This is your ultimate Google Slides beginners guide!
Hey friends!
I’m Tasia and welcome back to my YouTube Channel where I share tech tips, app reviews,
and so much Google content that it should be illegal.
In this video, we’re going to cover how to use Google slides.
So we’re talking navigating Google slides, creating presentations, and presenting and
exporting, and more.
So with that, on with the Google Sildes tutorial 2022.
So first things first, what is Google Slides?
Google slides is a free, web-based presentation program.
It’s essentially Google’s answer to PowerPoint.
You can create presentations in Google Slides if you have a Google account or a Google Workspace
account for business use.
So now that we know what Google Slides is let’s learn how to access Google Sides.
You can actually access Google Slides a couple of different ways.
First, you can access Slides from either your Gmail, Gcal, Google Drive, Google Meet and
a host of other Google Apps you might already be in.
So, to do so you’ll click on the Google Apps icon near the top right of your Gmail
or Photos, or Drive or whathave you and you just scroll down to Slides.
And click on the Slidea icon to open Google Slides.
Slides will pop open in a new tab for you.
Alternatively, if you’re already in your Google Drive, you don’t need to navigate
away, you can head to the top left, click on ‘new’ and then select Google Slides.
Doing this will take you right to a new blank presentation, rather than your slides homepage.
However, you can use a couple of browser shortcuts as well.
Head to your browser bar and type in slides.google.com and that will take you right to your google
slides if you’re signed into your Google account.
Or you can type in slides.new and that will open up a new blank Slides presentation for
you.
This browser bar trick works in any browser and if you’re not already signed into your
Google account, you’ll just be prompted to sign in from there.
And by the way, this trick works for your suite of Google apps - so think gmail, google
photos, docs and so on.
So now let’s dive more in depth on how to use Google Slides.
So if you’ve never created a presentation or no one has ever shared a presentation with
you, your Google Slides page will look a little bare, except for some templates at the top.
So there’s actually a couple of different ways to create a presentation in Google slides.
You can do the shortcuts to a new blank presentation like I just showed you, or you can start a
presentation from a template.
If you rather start from a template than from scratch, there are actually a lot more templates
here than it seems.
Click on where it says ‘template gallery’ near the top and you’ll be taken to the
full template gallery to explore a ton of options.
This is really handy when you’re just getting started with Slides and want to work off an
already-existing template to save you time.
But let’s go back and start a new presentation from scratch.
We’ll click on the start a new presentation option - and remember there are shortcuts
to this - and now here we are in a new blank presentation.
The first thing we want to do is name the presentation.
So up in the top left, just like we’d name a Google Doc or Sheet, we’re going to click
on ‘untitled presentation’ and give it a name.
This can be anything that makes sense for you.
So think project or client or team, things like that.
And now that we’ve created and named our presentation, let’s get familiar with the
layout of Google Slides.
Up at the top, under our presentation name, we’ve got a bunch tools that we’ll dive
into shortly, to the left is where all the slides we create will be.
Obviously right now we just have one slide.
In the middle we have the slide we are working on and to the very right, you may notice that
Google Slides gives us a bunch of themes we can choose from.
So if you don’t like this kind of plain layout here, you can pick a theme from the
side to jazz up your presentation a bit.
Now before you go and start creating an entire presentation with a bunch of slides, you may
want to set your aspect ratio, depending on your project.
So, head to file then page setup and here in this pop up you can choose an aspect ratio,
I’d recommend sticking to widescreen 16:9, but you may need something different and this
is where you’d do that - and yes you can create a custom aspect ratio here as well.
So now let’s actually start editing our Google Slides.
With your slide selected, simply click the text to edit it.
Of course, you can select the text in order to format it however you’d like.
You can change the font, the size, color, make it bold, and so on.
Now we already quickly selected a theme from Google here, but let’s say you don’t like
the background or you have a plain background and you want to change that.
You can do this really easily.
Just make sure you have the slide selected and now you’ll get a ‘background’ option
near the top.
So simply click on background, and here you can change the color.
You’ll be able to add a custom color or you can select a gradient.
You could also add an image as your background and you have a lot of options here as to where
you can upload an image from, but the Google Image Search option is great.
And, if you prefer, you can reset to the original theme if you don’t like the changes you’ve
made.
If you want to change the layout of the slide, with it selected, just click on ‘layout’
and play around with any of these other layout options.
This is purely based on your preferences.
So now that we’ve got our title slide how we want it, let’s create a new slide.
There are of course a couple ways to do this.
You can simply click the plus button near the top left and that will create a slide
that has title and body text.
Or, if you hover over the arrow to the right of the plus button, you have the choice of
creating a slide with a layout.
Alternatively, you can right click on the left hand side and select new slide to create
a new slide.
By the way, if you want to quickly delete a slide, just select it and hit delete or
backspace.
Or, if you want to re-arrange a slide, just click and drag that slide to where you want
it.
So now let’s say we want to create a blank slide, I’ll hover over that arrow to the
right of the plus symbol and select the blank formatting option.
So now let’s add some text, links, and media to our new slide.
Head up to the text box and select that to draw a text box wherever you like on your
slide.
You can move this box around to by hovering your mouse over it until you get the four
arrows.
Then just click and drag the text box where you want it.
Click inside the text box to type your text.
Then you can just grab the squares on the box and resize it however you want.
If you want to add a link to the slide you can do that too.
Simply select the text you want to link and click on the little link icon near the top,
then paste in the url where you want to link to, then click on ‘apply’.
You can change the hyperlink color too if you’d like.
So now let’s add media to our slide.
The quickest way to do this is to click on the little image icon.
Just like we did with the title slide, you’ll have the option of uploading from your computer,
searching the web, Drive, photos, etc.
So simply select the photo you want to add and once it’s on the slide you can re-arrange
it and re-size it however you like.
If you choose to add an image from the web, that will appear on the right hand side where
those themes were.
You can just use the search bar to search an image, select one or multiple images at
once, then select insert.
You can set a link for an image, if you want that image to be clickable, just like we did
for text, but what’s more useful is replacing an image.
So if you have an image where you want it on your slide, but you want to replace it
and keep the formatting the same, just select the image on the slide and then select replace
image.
Now the new image you select will replace that image for you.
If you want to delete an image, just select it and hit backspace.
And if you want to crop an image, double click on it and drag in on any of the black lines
to crop it where you want.
You’ll just click off the image to set the crop.
To undo anything you just did, hit command z or control z.
So I’m going to go ahead and create a new slide.
And now I want to add video to this slide.
Let’s head up to insert and select video.
Here, we can search youtube to add a video, which is so handy, you can search via a URL,
or you can pull a video from your Google Drive.
Once you’ve added a video, you’ll have additional formatting options to the right
- which I won’t get into in this beginner’s video - but just know that the options are
there.
Using Insert, you can add audio to a slide in a similar way too.
The difference here is the only way to add audio to Google Slides is to already have
the audio file in your google drive.
So keep that in mind.
But once it’s in your drive, you’ll just select it and add it to your slide.
And it’ll be added as a little speaker icon on your slide.
And now let’s quickly go over other things you can add to Google Slides.
You can add shapes, arrows, callouts, and equations.
You can add charts like bar graphs and pie charts.
And by the way to edit anything in a chart you add, click on the downward facing arrow
to the right and select open source.
This will open a new Sheet where you can edit the elements of the chart.
Once the chart is edited, back in your Slide, just select ‘update’ to show the changes.
You can also insert a diagram.
Google gives you some nice options here to choose from.
And of course you’ll just customize anything you select.
You can also insert word art, which is a quick way to punch up your text on your slides.
And, you can add lines, arrows, scribbles, and so on.
Alright, I promise we are nearing the end of this tutorial, but if you’re liking this
video so far, please remember to give it a like and subscribe to my Channel for more
content like this.
Alright, now we’ve got a lot of the basics down pat, it’s time to add transitions and
animations to our slides.
Of course, there are a few ways to do this.
With the slide selected you can either right click and select transition, or you can just
click on transition at the top.
This will open up the motion options to the right of your slide.
Here at the top is where you can set the slide transition, and the speed of the transition.
You’ll also have the option to apply the transition to all slides if you want.
You’ll know your slide has a transition if it’s marked with a little transition
symbol to the left of it in your preview window.
But transitions are only part of the fun.
Any element you add to your slide can be animated.
Simply select the element and here on the right, our object animations options will
be popped up for us.
If you don’t have this appearing on the right, it’s probably because you weren’t
already in the slide transition selection.
So, no worries, you’d select your object on the slide, and click on animate at the
top.
So now, under object animations, you can add an animation, how you want the animation to
appear, as well as the speed of the animation.
Then, you can hit the play button to preview what the transition and object animations
look like.
Now let’s quickly talk about collaborating in Google Slides.
I won’t spend too long on this, but just like you can in virtually any of your other
Google Apps, you can collaborate in slides too.
Head on up to the share button in the top right and click that to access your sharing
options.
You can manually add people, set the access if you want more or less restrictions, or
create and copy a link to your Google Slide.
By now you’ve pretty much mastered the basics of Google Slides, so all that’s left to
learn is how to present, export and download Google Slides.
And ya, all of this is pretty easy too - thanks Google!
So first, to present, you’ll head up to the slideshow option near the top right.
You can simply hit the slideshow button or you can click the downward facing arrow to
the right to open up presenter view - so this will start the slideshow with presenter notes
and audience q&a, or you can present on another screen from here too.
Now to download Google slides, you just have to head up to file and hover over download,
then select your export options.
This is how to export Google Slides as PowerPoint files.
Or, you can also download the current selected slide as a jpeg or png image.
It’s really that easy.
If you got a lot out of this Google Slides tutorial and maybe you want a more advanced
tutorial, let me know in the comments below, and I’ll get crackin on it.
So that’s my Google Slides beginners guide.
Did you learn everything you hoped from this tutorial?
Let everyone know in the comments below.
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See ya next time!