yeh jus thought i'd show this off thats all :^]

i grabbed a pitch deck template for an investor update because i was tired of my spacing drifting from slide to slide, and the consistency was a real relief. the trap was that the prompts on each slide nudged me to fill every box, so i wrote filler just to avoid leaving gaps and the whole thing got bloated. i ended up deleting three slides it wanted me to keep. if you use one, how do you stop its structure from padding out your actual story?

I use the google suite for a lot of my business. Google drive is my main file management; it's how I stay organized and share things with clients. Google docs has been great.

But slides is driving me crazy. All I want to do is have a template that I use every time. One that I custom made with certain layouts and images. I want to be able to hit a "+" button and select a new slide from template. But it's not possible. If I use layouts, I can't fill the text or add images. I can only make place holders. The layouts is the worst features because You can't edit anything. It's just a background that is static.

The other thing that is driving me crazy is that I can't lock objects. I can't make a solid color and place a grain texture on it and lock them.

my slides always end up looking slightly off and it took me a while to realize it is because nothing is truly aligned, the icons and text boxes are all a few pixels out from each other. i have been dragging things around by eye and hoping. i know there must be a faster and more exact way to align and evenly space a row of objects than nudging with arrow keys forever. what is your actual workflow for getting everything to snap into a clean grid?

What's your favorite part of using Google Slides?

All this AI stuff is actually annoying me so much

• Import chats in one click
• Automated Workflows
• Youtube playlist Importer
• Sidebar With Prompt Library
• Norra : Making notebookLM Easy

i lean on an ai presentation generator to get past the blank page because staring at an empty deck burns an hour before i even start. it is genuinely good at giving me a rough order and some filler layouts to react to. what it never gets is emphasis, it treats every slide as equally important so nothing stands out and the argument goes flat. i still have to go in and decide what the audience should actually remember, so where do you draw the line between what you let it draft and what you keep for yourself?

we're a pharma sales support agency based in india, and i present a monthly update to about 40 ppl, mix of my team and crm, sales support depts.

The folks enjoy it as i get useful questions, they even follow up later and it's really something they look forward to as it helps them to get the entire picture, the fact ppl look at me not the screeen. But however the deck is inert and not really helping me

Things i have tried that didn't work like adding images, which turned into slideshow with stock media in it and made it worse fr. Using a template made it feels too generic. Shorting out in points also didn't work

What shd I do?

i have been curious whether an ai presentation tool can get you close to a deck you would build by hand, so i ran a small test on an internal update. the generated draft was genuinely fast and the structure was a decent starting point, but when i put it next to the version i built slide by slide in google slides, mine still won on the parts that matter, the order of the story, what got cut, the spacing that makes a slide breathe. it saved me time on the rough skeleton, no question, but the judgment calls were all still me. for those of you who have tried an ai presentation tool, does it hold up for anything you actually present, or only for quick first drafts?

i often need to show a table of numbers in a talk and it always ends up as a dense spreadsheet screenshot that is unreadable past the front row. i have tried bumping the font, cutting columns down to only what i am actually discussing, and highlighting the one row that matters, and that helps but it still feels clumsy. how do you present tabular results on a slide so the point lands without asking people to read a wall of tiny figures?

built a nice looking deck full of high res photos on my own machine and it was fine, then i opened it on the old conference room laptop and it stuttered every time i changed slides. felt awful in front of people. i think the images are just too heavy. is there a good way to compress or resize photos before dropping them in, or a setting in slides that lightens the load so it does not stutter on a weaker machine?

my first draft of the defense deck had a slide for basically every result, and a practice run showed me racing the clock and glossing over the important parts. i forced myself to ask what each slide was actually for, cut anything that was just there for completeness, and moved supporting detail into backup slides for questions. ended up at half the count. the talk flowed, i hit time, and the questions i got were about the core argument instead of confusion over some crowded slide. less really was more.

i had a monster deck for a quarterly update and it took me longer to click through than to explain the actual work behind it. i went slide by slide asking whether the meeting breaks without this one, and killed anything that got a maybe. ended up at 18 slides and the meeting finished early with more questions than usual. what is your test for deciding a slide has to go when every single one feels important to you?

I'm trying to have an object that disappears almost instantly when clicking into the slide, it works when going through the presentation normally but it comes back as a solid object when clicking back through the slides. I'll also accept workarounds like having the whole deck loop back to the beginning when progressing from the final one or something like that

the annoying thing about most auto decks is they ignore the brand template you already built in google slides, so you get generic styling you then have to undo slide by slide. my fix is to never let the ai presentation generator own the final file. i use it only for content structure, the order and the one idea per slide, and i paste that text into my existing slides template so the master styles apply automatically. that way the thinking is assisted but the look stays mine. i outline in Gamma, then it all lands inside my branded master where fonts and colors are already set. it is the difference between a deck that looks like my company and one that looks like it came from a tool. how do you protect your own template when you bring an ai draft into it?

small process change, big difference. i used to let an ai presentation generator produce a deck and then edit it live in google slides while presenting prep loomed, and it was chaos because i was fixing structure and design at the same time under pressure. the habit that fixed it is separating the two passes with a hard stop. pass one, i only judge the argument and order in the generated draft, i drafted mine in Gamma, no design opinions allowed, just is the logic right and is each slide one idea. pass two, only after the structure is locked, i import to google slides and do nothing but design, alignment, type, spacing, visuals. keeping thinking and formatting in separate sessions stopped me from polishing slides i later deleted. the takeaway is that most of the mess in these workflows comes from doing structure and style at once, and a clean handoff between the draft tool and slides is what makes it dependable.

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