TOP 12 Google Slides Tips for Productivity!

Key Takeaways

love it or hate it i think it goes without saying that creating google slide presentations quickly and effectively is the hallmark of any productive student or working professional so in this video i'm going to share the top 12 tips to use during the creation collaboration and presentation stages of the google slides life cycle to make your life just a tiny bit easier let's get started hi friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is jeff and we're all about practical career and productivity tips so if you're student or working professional consider subscribing for more actual content starting with the tricks that will help you create amazing presentations tip number one using the explore and drive functions to quickly find images so let's say i want to create a speaker slide for this totally real panel discussion that we're having first speaker is superman so i go the explore button down here type in superman and go to images here and find an image that i like this lego one seems kind of cool so i press the plus button to insert it directly into the slide re-slide resize a little bit get rid of the link and we'll come back to this the second speaker spider-man i don't want to use something from google images because as we all know peter parker takes his own photos so instead i go to insert image a drive and i have a picture of spider-man actually over here and i simply just drag and drop it over resize it while holding down shift all right now a square or rectangular picture doesn't look very good so we can quickly edit these photos using tip number two cropped to a specific shape directly if you already have a square photo like the spiderman one the process is very easy go to the downward arrow next to the crop button shapes and click circle and boom there you have it now for rectangular photos like the superman one you can double click it to bring up the crop tool drag the black lines over to make a sort of square shape it doesn't have to be perfect you can just eyeball it right here press enter to crop and repeat the process shapes and circle and there you have it quick and easy in all seriousness i use the insert image drive feature a lot when making post event debrief slides because we usually have a folder full of pictures from the event so when making the slides i could easily just drag and drop the good ones onto the page as opposed to copy pasting between applications tip number three is to automatically resize your text box to fit the text inside so let's say i wanted to add a description for superman i'll go to the text box selection here just click here hi everyone my name is superman i stand on the side of justice you'll notice that the text box is smaller than the text itself now you can click on this button here and choose shrink text on overflow or resize shape to fit text by doing this every single time would get super annoying so uh what you can do is go to tools preferences and make sure the use custom autofit preferences is checked and make sure you have selected resize shape to fit text for both and press ok now if i wanted to create a new text box for spidermind hi everyone i'm your friendly neighborhood spooderman you'll notice that the text box itself has expanded uh to fit the text being inputted google slides productivity tip number four is related to the format paintbrush here i'm sure all of you have used this feature before but did you know in google slides you can double click it and apply the same formatting to as many elements as you want without having to re-click it check this out so i have this selected here right i double-click the paint format apply apply apply apply and then press escape to exit out google slides productivity hack number five is to use the new and improved master slide function to update all slides in one go so you know how in professional corporate presentations they have this like confidential disclaimer on the bottom left and the company logo on the bottom right instead of having to copy paste this onto every single slide you can select these two command c or ctrl c around windows go to slide edit master and paste it onto the corresponding master slide i say new and improved because unlike before you can actually see the slides that will be affected for example if i change this master slide this will affect these three actual slides so if i want to cover every single slide i'd have to repeat this process two to three times obviously this is a lot more useful if you have 50 or more slides in a single presentation by the way please let me know down the comments below if you actually like this format of me going through the process of making slides as opposed to just spitting out tips randomly now moving on to the inevitable collaboration phase of your presentation lifecycle where your teammates screw up everything you've done so far productivity tip number six search for specific google slides documents directly from google drive there might be times when you know you're searching for a google slide stock and you don't want like sheets docs or other folders to pop up in your search so what you can do is in addition to the keyword you can type in type presentation and only google slides and powerpoint documents will show up in your search results or sometimes especially at work you might have a lot of google slides shared with you right if you want to just find the ones uh created and owned by you you can type in owner me and this filters out only the ones you created of course you can replace me with the name of your colleague or teammates as well if you watch my google doc video this next one might not be too much of a surprise but productivity tip and trick number seven is to send your google slides in presentation mode directly before sharing you just want to replace the edit word here with the word present and now when you send that new link over they'll open it in presentation mode automatically this is very useful if you have a final draft and you want someone to quickly run through and review it without the need to make any edits similarly you can replace a word here with the word copy and this forces the viewer to make a copy of your google slides document just remember to make sure your sharing settings are correct before sending the new links over speaking of copying google slides productivity tip number eight is to make a clean copy of specific slides what does this mean two things so let's say you want to copy three specific slides from my presentation you hold down command or control on windows select the three slides go to file make a copy select the slides and before you press ok check remove all speaker notes to remove all the speaker notes down here to make a clean copy what i like to do at work is if i come across a presentation i really like i just steal it no i asked my colleagues permission to make a copy rename it to template and the type of presentation it's used for for example project briefing so next time i can just right click and make a copy whenever i want to create a new presentation for that use case bonus time as a thank you for sticking with me this far i've included a link to this beautiful template my friend made down below i've used it before i've taken out all the content but it looks really pretty so you can use it right away lastly the presentation stage the moment you get to shine in front of the audience productivity tip number nine quickly skip or reorder your slides we've all been there with three minutes ago someone tells you hey let's skip the slide or move this to the beginning or to the end no problem simply right click the slide you want to take action on you can choose to skip it so in presentation mode this slide gets skipped over or if you want to move a slide to the beginning or end simply choose the corresponding action down here presentation tip number 10 navigate to a specific slide in presentation mode now there are actually three different ways to do this number one you can actually just go down to the menu here and click the slide you want to go to or number two if you're feeling very confident in your memorization abilities you can literally type in the slide number and press enter to jump to that slide or my personal favorite number three if you know you're going to go to specific slide just hyperlink it beforehand so there are no awkward pauses in between the cool thing about slides is that if you hyperlink to a specific page let's just use this as an example i want to hyperlink to that a slide just now press command k this will actually just automatically jump to that slide in presentation mode as opposed to opening up a new document productivity tip number 11 real quick you can press l in presentation mode to bring up the laser pointer to highlight the thing that's most important on the slide that you want to draw attention to and finally tip and trick number 12 include an interactive q a session in your presentation so instead of actually pressing present you actually want to go to the drop down menu here and go to presenter view in this view go to audience tools and click start new now you actually see there's a link for your audience to go to to start asking questions and if i click into it i can see how the interface looks and ask a question hi so who would win if i want to be sneaky i can ask this question anonymously and then click submit and others could upvote or downvote my comment as needed i love to use this feature for larger audiences because i sincerely believe a good presentation requires some sort of interactive element and this is also a really good way for the audience to write down questions throughout your presentation as opposed to waiting to the very end and forgetting what they wanted to say let me know down in the comments which one of these tips was your favorite and i've also included a playlist here with cool productivity hacks for other tools see you on the next video and in the meantime have a great one