Create, present, and share a presentation

A presentation belongs to Personal or the team that was selected when it was made. Open Presentations and select Create presentation. Enter a Presentation title and choose a starting point: Blank deck, Project update, Pitch deck, or Paste JSON to build the whole deck from a JSON document (see Build a presentation by pasting JSON). A starter adds ordinary slides that you can change or delete. To rename a deck, select Edit beside its title in the page bar.

Build slides

The toolbar above the slide holds the slide tools:

• Add slide and Duplicate slide (or press N and Ctrl/⌘ D), and Add title slide and Add two-column slide for a slide with placeholder text.
• Add text, Add image, Add shape and Add arrow. Add image opens the image picker, where you can choose several pictures from Your images or upload new ones. Make selected text a list adds bullet markers to the selected text.
• Edit selected opens a drawer beside the slide with how the selected item looks, described below, and Bring forward, Send back and Delete.
• Speaker notes, Background and Accent. Background sets the colour of the current slide and of slides you add, and replaces a gradient on the slide; Undo brings the gradient back. Accent sets the colour of shapes and arrows you add.
• Undo and Redo.

Select an item to move or resize it; it snaps to the slide's edges and centre as you drag. Double-click text on the slide to edit it in place. Press Delete to remove the selected item.

The slides are listed down the left. Drag a slide to move it, or use its up and down buttons. The eye button hides a slide from presenting and from PDF export without deleting it, and × deletes a slide. Undo brings back a deleted slide while the editor is open.

The editor saves the draft automatically, and the page bar reads Draft saved. If another tab saves a newer version of the deck, reload before continuing so you do not overwrite it.

Change how an item looks

Select an item on the slide, then Edit selected. The drawer stays open beside the slide: each change shows on the slide as you make it and is saved with the draft, and selecting another item shows that item's settings. Undo takes back one change at a time, and typing a number then leaving the field counts as one change.

• For text: Text (the words), Font, Text size, Weight, Text colour, Italic and All capitals, then Alignment, Vertical alignment (the top, middle or bottom of its box), Letter spacing (a percentage of the text size) and Line height. The fonts the deck already uses are listed first.
• For a shape: Shape, Corner radius for rectangles, the Fill and the Outline colour and width. The fill is a solid colour, a linear or radial gradient from a start colour to an end colour, or none. A linear gradient's Angle sets its direction: 90 runs left to right and 180 top to bottom. A radial gradient spreads out from its Centre. A shape left with no fill and no outline is given an outline, so it can still be seen.
• For a line or an arrow: Colour, Width, Style (solid, dashed or dotted) and Arrowhead. An arrow is a line with an arrowhead.
• For every item, pictures included: Opacity (100% is solid) and Rotation, in degrees.

The colour picker offers the colours already in the deck. In a gradient with more than two colours, from an imported deck, the colours between the start and the end stay as they are.

Speaker notes

Select Speaker notes to write notes for the current slide. Notes are for you: they are not shown in the shared deck, when presenting, or in a PDF.

Present

Select Present in the page bar. The deck opens in a new tab without editing controls. → or Space goes to the next slide, ← to the previous one, and on a phone a swipe moves between slides. Press F for full screen. Hidden slides are skipped.

Publish and share by link

Editing changes a draft. Publish copies the draft to the published version; after later changes the button reads Publish changes, and Published when nothing has changed since.

Select Share in the page bar, then Share by link, to let anyone with the link view the published version without signing in. Copy link copies it, and the page bar has a button that opens the shared deck. You can turn on the link only after the deck has been published. Later edits are not shown on the link until you publish again. Stop sharing turns the link off.

Give people access

Members of the deck's team have access through the team. To give someone else access, select Share, and under People with access enter their handle, choose Can view or Can edit, and select Add collaborator.

Someone who is not on the team will be invited. Once they accept, they join the team as a guest who can open this deck and nothing else in the team, and the deck is listed on their Presentations page when that team is selected; see Guests on a team. Until then the drawer lists them as Invited, waiting, with Cancel. A guest of the team is added at once.

Only people who can edit the deck through its team can add or remove people. Removing someone who has nothing else in the team also removes them from it, and the confirmation says so.

Export a PDF

Select More in the page bar, then Export PDF. The deck opens in a new tab with the browser's print dialog, one visible slide per landscape page; choose Save as PDF there. The export uses the current draft and leaves out speaker notes and hidden slides. The deck does not need to be published.

Import, duplicate, move or delete a deck

More, the last button in the page bar, has Open shared deck once the deck is shared by link, Export PDF, and:

• Import JSON, which replaces every slide in the draft with the slides in a pasted JSON document. The published version stays until you publish again.
• Duplicate, which makes a copy and opens it.
• Move to another team, for a deck created in the wrong place. Draft and published slides, speaker notes, the shared link and the people it is shared with stay with the deck. The destination team's members get access; members of the team it left may lose it. Someone it is shared with who is not on the destination team becomes its guest; when that team has no room for more guests, the move is refused and nothing changes.
• Move to Trash. It moves at once; select Undo in the message to put it back, or restore it from Trash within 30 days. Only people who can edit the deck's team can move it to Trash.

Presentations in the mobile app

The mobile app lists the decks in Personal or the selected team and creates a new one from a starter. A deck's page shows whether it is published, with Publish current draft and a Sharing choice of Private or Anyone with the link.

The deck's menu has Slides and notes, Share published link (once the deck is published and shared), Share PDF, Duplicate, Collaborators, Move to another team and Move to Trash. In Slides and notes, editors can change a slide's title, the words of its text boxes, its speaker notes and whether it is hidden, and can move, duplicate or delete slides. Changes go to the draft; publish to update the shared deck. If someone saved the deck in the meantime, the app asks you to review the latest slides first. Share PDF makes a PDF of the draft, one slide per page, without hidden slides or speaker notes. It sets text in a standard font of the same kind as the deck's (serif, sans-serif or monospaced), and fills a shape that has a gradient with one colour. Layout, pictures, shapes, new text boxes and colours are changed in the website editor.

Presentations and the assistant

The assistant can create, duplicate and change presentations, publish them, turn the link on or off, add a collaborator (someone who is not on the team is invited), and move a deck to Trash. It publishes, shares, adds a collaborator or moves a deck to Trash only when you confirm it in your message.

If a shared presentation shows an older version, a picture is missing from a PDF, or saving keeps failing, Contact support.