A slide page is a kind of page in Illustrate mode made for a presentation: one slide of a deck, always landscape, laid out to be read across a room. You build it like any page, from shapes, text, icons, images and charts, and each slide page has a button that puts it in the tab's slide deck, ready to present.
Adding a Slide Page
-
New to slides? Open the page's cog and press Show Me at the top of its panel: it opens the Layout and Background popovers on your own slide, points at its deck button, and opens the Slide Deck where you press Present. The Illustrate Tour offers the same walkthrough the first time you work on a slide.
-
Press the + after the last page and choose Slide in Add a Page, or choose Slide when a new tab's first page asks What Is This Page For?
-
To start a whole deck at once, the Slide deck template opens a six-slide pitch (title, problem, solution, traction, team and the ask) on slide pages. Find it in the New Document wizard or Quick Start (Templates).
-
A slide page is always landscape. Its page panel's Page tab offers two sizes and no orientation: Slide (widescreen 16:9) and Classic (the older 4:3). Its label reads, for example, "Page 3 · Slide (16:9) · Slide".
-
It takes a Background and a pattern like any page, from the Background button in its title bar or its panel's Background tab (Illustrate Mode). Its panel holds the Page and Background tabs.
-
A slide page's Background also has Animated: twenty-four moving backgrounds such as Aurora, Starfield, Retro Grid, Waves, Warp, Orbits, Confetti and Threads, each in your theme's colours, with Colours below to choose how deep or bright. They move on the slide, while you present and in a GIF export; the other exports show them still, and with Reduce Motion on they stay still on screen too.
Slide Layouts
A slide page's Layout button, in its title bar beside Background and the cog, opens its layouts on any slide, empty or not, and an empty slide page also shows a card of layouts over it. They offer the slide layouts instead of the infographic ones, built for a landscape slide in your tab's theme, with type sized for a room. They are grouped into five categories:
| Category | Layouts |
|---|---|
| Openers | Title Slide, Section Header, Agenda, Title and Image, Keynote Title, Opening Question, About the Speaker, Objectives, Agenda Grid |
| Content | Title and Bullets, Two Columns, Image and Text, Statement, Quote, Three Points, Full Image, Key Takeaway, Four Ideas |
| Data | Big Number, Key Stats, Chart Story, Comparison, Three Big Numbers, Big Chart, Chart and Insights, Goals Progress, KPI Dashboard, Market Share |
| Steps and Time | Process, Timeline, Roadmap, Process Flow, Milestones, Now, Next, Later, Funnel, Cycle, Project Plan |
| Closers | Thank You, Team, Summary, Call to Action, Next Steps, Contact, Questions, Thank You and Image, Resources |
That is 46 in all. A few are worth knowing by name:
- Title Slide: a large title, a subtitle, an accent rule, and the presenter and date at the foot.
- Section Header: a big section number, an accent rule, the section's title and a line.
- Title and Bullets: a title over five bullet points.
- Two Columns: a title over two columns, each a heading and three bullet points.
- Image and Text: an image filling the left half, with a title, a line and three bullet points to its right.
- Statement: one sentence set very large and centred, with a line under it.
- Thank You: a large "Thank you", "Questions?" and a contact line.
- Opening Question: one question set large to open the talk, and a line under it.
- Three Big Numbers: three figures across, all the same size, a caption and a note under each.
- Now, Next, Later: a roadmap in three columns of cards.
- Call to Action: one bold ask, centred, with a button-like pill and where to start.
The rest are the same layouts as the infographic ones of the same name. Hover a layout to preview it on the page, and click to place it: it is placed at once, your titles, words and pictures carried into it, and one Undo brings the old layout back. Every layout is ordinary elements holding sample text, so change anything you like. See Infographic Layouts for how the browser works.
The Deck Button
First in each slide page's title bar, left of Layout and Background, is the page's deck button. It shows the page's place in the tab's slide deck:
- Add to Slides (the Slide Deck icon) while the deck has no slide of this page. Press it and the page joins the end of the deck as a slide.
- Hide in Slides (an open eye) once it is in the deck: press it to keep the slide in the deck but skip it when presenting. The eye is then crossed, and Show in Slides brings it back. It is the same switch as the slide's visibility in the Slide Deck panel.
Once the page is in the deck, Add Notes sits beside it. Press it to write your speaker notes for that slide: they belong to the slide in the deck, so they are the same notes the Slide Deck panel shows, and you see them in the presenter view, never on the slide itself. Once a slide has notes the button reads Notes.
Other kinds of page (infographic, article and logo) have no Add to Slides button; add them from the Slide Deck panel instead. Once one is in the deck, the same eye appears beside its cog too. The deck button is for Editors on a computer: Viewers and Participants see the pages without it, and it is not shown on a phone.
Building and Presenting the Deck
The Slides button in the bottom-right corner opens the Slide Deck panel. There you can add any page with Add as slide, rename slides, add speaker notes, hide them and reorder them (Exporting and Presenting Pages).
A slide made from a page is the page, live: change the page and the slide changes with it, and reordering or resizing the page never leaves the slide behind. Delete the page and its slide stays, empty, so you can see what happened and fix it.
Press Present and each slide page fills the screen edge to edge on its own, with no labels, cogs or neighbouring pages. A 16:9 slide fills a 16:9 screen exactly; any other shape sits between black bars, as a projector shows it. Everything else about presenting works as for any deck: see Presenting.
Arrows on a slide stay on that slide: in Illustrate mode an arrow's end only pins to an element on the same page, so nothing on one slide is tied to another.
Was this article helpful?