How to Survive Life After Microsoft PowerPoint With Google Slides

Your slide presentation days are not over! And they certainly do not have to be boring. With using Google Apps, you have access to Google Slides which holds the ability to customize, insert (and edit!) pictures, create your own templates for future use, and more. In this post, we’ll be discussing both the similarities and differences between using Gslides and MS PowerPoint, as well as Gslides’ distinct features it has to offer and ultimately why the transfer from MS PowerPoint to GSlides can be made with little to no adjustment.

Getting the Look: Select (Or Build) a Custom Theme

Not even Steve Jobs settled for just black text on a white screen for his presentations, and you don’t have to be a minimalist in Google Slides, either. Google Slides come stock with a wide range of presentation themes and layouts. Once you’ve arrived at a combination of styles you like, you can customize your presentations master slides for later reuse. Like the look of someone else’s Gslides? You can import a Google Slides theme from another presentation.

Search Me: Insert Images, Video and Text from Google

A picture is worth a thousand words. No one likes word-heavy presentations. Therefore, your Google Slides deck is better off with pictures. The good news is that inserting an image in a Gslide is easy. The great news is that Gslides makes finding an image really easy, too. You can grab any image from your Google Drive, any image from your device’s hard drive, or any image with a published web URL. Gslides will even automatically connect to your local webcam and let you take a snapshot for immediate insertion into your presentation. And all of that takes a back seat to Google Slides’ built-in image search. If there’s one thing Google does best, it’s search, and the native image search in all Google Drive apps is stellar. You can search the entire web for an image, or you can constrain your search to an authorized stock image library or, best of all, Google’s licensed copy of the LIFE magazine image archives. Oh, and there’s always the Google Research Pane, which will expand your search to videos, quotations, tables and scholarly articles, and even cite them according to Chicago, MLA or APA style guidelines. If you can’t find an appropriate image, video or collateral item from all of that, it’s not a software problem.

Picture This: Edit Images (And Tables…and Word Art…) On the Fly

So you’ve found an image that is almost right for your presentation, but it needs some polish. You can edit images within Google Slides, with full options to crop, shrink, filter or frame an image as you need. And the editing options don’t stop at JPGs, PNGs and GIFs, you can edit embedded tables, create custom word art, and auto-align all of it to an invisible grid to make everything look professional. Bottom line: There’s no excuse for your presentation being nothing but text; Google Slides make it too easy to insert images that enhance your presentation. HELLO, WORLD: EMBED A PRESENTATION ON THE WEB So you’ve finally crafted the perfect presentation; it’s time to share your deck-based wisdom with the world by embedding your Google Slides in a web page. It works just like embedding an image or video in a blog post of Google Sites page, and it makes you Gslide deck accessible to the entire World Wide Web. If you need to share a Google Slides deck with all your customers, partners or prospects, embedding your Gslides is the easiest way to get it done.