Create Google Slides: To create a new presentation, go to your Google Drive, click the red New button, and select Slides from the drop-down menu. As soon as you name the document or start typing, Google Slides will automatically save your work every few seconds. At the top of the document, you'll see text that indicates when your document was last saved.You can also start a new slide while in an existing Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, or Drawing. Just click the File menu, click on New and choose Slide.
Template Gallery:
If you want to quickly create a presentation, you can pick one of the templates in the gallery under the Google Slides homepage. Each template has standard text that you can replace with your own, and preset design styles that you can use for your presentation.
Activity: Take time to explore the Google Slides homepage and see what options are available.
Bonus: Check out the template options in Slides Carnival. There are some great (and Free!) Google Slides templates also available there.
Upload an Existing Presentation:
You can also upload a variety of file types into Google Drive and have it automatically convert into a document. To Upload a file (MS Word, Excel, PPT, PDF, etc.) into Drive, Click NEW and then Upload.
Click Choose File or Browse, select the document, and click Open. You can upload and convert the following file types: (.ppt, .pptx, .pps)
Choose a name for the file if you want the file name to be different from the current file name.
Click Upload File.
Be sure that in your upload settings (in the Gear settings in the right corner of Drive) are set to Convert Uploads.
Explore with Google SlidesCrafting the perfect pitch deck or sharing your team’s story is hard enough without having to make it look great, too. Explore in Slides makes design polishing simple. As you work, Explore dynamically generates design suggestions, based on the content of your slide. Simply pick a recommendation and apply it with a single click — no cropping, resizing or reformatting required.
We’ve seen that people save over 30% of the time they would have spent on formatting when they use Explore. So even if design isn’t your style, rest assured you’ll have a beautiful presentation to be proud of. Instantly.
Editing a Presentation:
When you create a new Google Presentation, you are presented with the document interface that provides options for editing.
You will find that many of the same editing features that you are used to in Microsoft PowerPoint are also available in Google Presentation. In the activity below, you'll find all the features you need to create a great document.
Inserting an Image:
Using images is a great way to make your presentations more colorful. Here are a few ways to insert an image into your presentation:
Drag-and-drop an image from your computer directly into a slide.
Upload an image that’s saved to your computer.
While working in a desktop application, copy an image and paste it right into your presentation.
Use your webcam to take a snapshot.
Enter the URL of a publicly available image from the Internet.
Find an image through Google Image Search.
Choose an image that’s in one of your Picasa Web Albums.
Search the stock photography archive and select an image.
You can also add a custom image as the background for either one or all slides of your presentation. To do so, access the Background menu, and add your image.
Here's something awesome, check out the Unsplash Add-on for Google Slides for high quality images in your presentation.
Inserting a Video:
You can add a video from YouTube into your presentation. Here’s how:
The video will appear in your presentation. Once you’ve started playing a video, you can maximize it to the full size of a slide by clicking the full screen icon at the bottom right of the video.
Go to the Insert menu and select Video.
Then, search for a video you'd like to insert or enter a URL from YouTube.
After you've selected a video, check the box next to the video's thumbnail and click Insert Video.
Inserting other objects:
Animations: Animations are helpful way to make your slides look more dynamic. They’re also a great way to reveal text or objects on a slide one step at a time. For example, you could have five bullet points of text, and reveal them one-by-one on the slide with each click.To place animations on a slide in the new version of Google presentations, open the Animations pane. Here are the three ways to open the Animations pane:Select a slide. Then, go to the View menu and select Animations. The Animations pane will appear on the right side of your screen.
Select a shape. Then, go to the Insert menu and select Animations. The Animations pane will appear on the right side of your screen.
Right click on a selected shape and select Animate.
Google Apps 101 by Kurt Wismer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.