Seamless collaboration and simple to use
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Google Slides for presentations, proposals and reports in my organisation – it's our main collaborative document format. We export to PDF or PPT format to share with clients, and present straight out of Google Slides Presenter View, using speaker's notes. As we work in a Google Drive / Gmail environment, it seamlessly works into our filing and communications systems. It is much simpler to use collaboratively with other team mates than Keynote on iCloud (our previous approach to collaborative documents), and without the expense of all being in a Microsoft/SharePoint environment to work on collaborative Powerpoint files.
Pros
- Intuitive tools and interface – if you've used Powerpoint, you'll find your way around fine
- Selection of Google fonts ready to use
- Version control and tracking changes
- Collaborative work environment for multiple editors working at once
- Presentation mode with speaker's view and presentation view
Cons
- Managing colour palettes is painful – there doesn't seem to be a way to remove incorrect colours, so we'll often have multiple versions of not-quite-right brand colours in the palette
- There's no way to set up sections, like Powerpoint, which would be helpful for particularly long documents
- I CAN NOT STAND the new AI pop-ups. They're intrusive and impossible to turn off permanently. The 'beautify this slide' prompt under every slide is infuriating, especially because it takes up valuable slide viewing space in the screen, and the slide doesn't resize to use that space, even after you close the pop-up. The 'shorten this content' pop up on the bottom right corner of text boxes often gets in the way of reading what you're writing, which is annoying and distracting.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well-suited to working on presentations or PowerPoint-style documents, including setting up templated slides and working collaboratively on presentations. It's less well-suited to setting up printable documents, though I have used it for simple printable documents, you just need to remember to set the slide size to A4 (or your preferred paper size) measurements.
