How to Use Google Slides - Beginner's Guide

Open any web browser and go to slides.google.com or drive.google.com. Sign in with your Google account. If you don't have one yet, click Create Account and walk through the free signup - it takes about two minutes.

There's nothing to download. Everything runs inside the browser tab, which means your Chromebook, your old laptop, and a brand new PC all behave exactly the same. From the Slides home page you can start a new presentation, or browse the ones you already have.

From Google Drive, click the New button at the top left. The menu opens with Folder, File upload, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and More. Click Google Slides to open a fresh deck in a new tab.

You can also start from the Slides home screen by clicking the big plus sign labeled Blank. The result is the same - an empty presentation with one title slide ready to edit.

At the top left, your new deck is called Untitled presentation. Click that text, type a real name, and press Enter. The new name shows up immediately.

You don't need to hit Save. Slides writes every change to your Google Drive in the background. Look just below the menu bar - it says All changes saved in Drive. Click the small folder icon next to the title to move the file into a Drive folder so it's easy to find later.

The Themes panel opens on the right side of a new deck. Scroll through Simple Light, Simple Dark, Momentum, Paradigm, Material, and the rest. Click any one to apply it to your whole presentation at once.

Themes set the fonts, colors, backgrounds, and slide layouts for you. That means the deck looks consistent without you having to format each slide by hand. If you closed the panel, reopen it from the Slide menu - pick Change theme at the bottom.

Your title slide has two text boxes - Click to add title and Click to add subtitle. Click the title box and type the name of your presentation. Tab down or click the subtitle box and add a short line underneath.

You can grab any text box by its border and drag it to a new spot. The blue handles on the corners and sides let you resize it. The theme keeps your fonts and colors consistent without you having to think about them.

Select the text you want to change by clicking and dragging across it. The formatting toolbar at the top lights up: font name, font size, bold, italic, underline, text color, and highlight color.

Pick a font from the dropdown (More fonts at the bottom adds new ones from Google Fonts). Type a number in the size box or use the plus and minus buttons. The text color and fill bucket icons change the color of selected text and any selected shape's background.

Click the plus sign at the top left of the slide panel to add a new slide using the same theme. To pick a different layout (title and body, two columns, blank, and others), click the small arrow next to the plus sign and choose one.

The thumbnail panel on the left shows every slide in order. Click and drag a thumbnail up or down to change the order. Right-click any thumbnail to duplicate, delete, or skip it during presentations.

Click the slide you want to add content to. Go to Insert in the menu bar to see every option: Image, Text box, Audio, Video, Shape, Table, Chart, and more.

Image lets you upload from your computer, search the web for copyright-safe pictures, pull from Drive or Google Photos, paste a URL, or snap from your webcam. Video opens a search box for YouTube - find the clip you want, click Select, and the video embeds right in the slide with options to mute or trim. Chart pulls from Google Sheets or builds a bar, line, or pie chart directly in Slides.

When the deck is ready, click the Present button at the top right. The first slide takes over your screen and the toolbar disappears. Click anywhere or press the right arrow to move to the next slide.

Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen to see the presenter toolbar: jump to any slide, turn on the laser pointer, enable captions for live transcription, and open speaker notes on a second screen. Press Esc or click Exit to return to the editor.

Click the yellow Share button at the top right. The Share panel opens. Type an email address in the People field, add a quick message, and pick a permission level from the dropdown: Viewer (read-only), Commenter (can leave feedback), or Editor (can change anything).

Click Send and that person gets an email with a link to your deck. To share with a bigger group, click Get link at the bottom of the panel and copy the URL - anyone with the link gets the permission level you set.