 Creating presentations using Google Slides. Google Slides is one of the most popular presentation tools available, and there are many reasons that make this a good choice. Google Slides is browser-based, which means there are no programs to install and you present right from the browser. This makes it a good option if you're unsure about what kind of computer will be in the room, as well as allowing you to present without downloading any additional software. Slides has themes. This makes it easy to find free, attractive, and easy to use themes and templates to make your presentation look good with little design knowledge. In this video, we'll cover the basics of using Google Slides to create a beautiful presentation. The first step is outlining your content. Decide on a working title and some main points that you want your audience to take away from the presentation. This will give you a rough structure that you can begin to fill in with more details. If you can, try to frame your content as a narrative. Stories and personal anecdotes help your audience to relate to you and your content. To learn more, watch our storytelling video on the Learning Portal. The narrative format can help keep an audience engaged, but you need to back these stories up with relevant data and examples to boost your content's credibility. This can be done through relevant charts or infographics to keep your presentation visually interesting. To begin the process of creating a presentation, open Google Slides and log in with your Google account. Chances are you already have one of these, whether it be an account with Gmail, YouTube, or Google Sites. You'll immediately be presented with options to start a new presentation from the template gallery. Feel free to explore all the potential options, download a free template online, or create a new presentation from scratch. When you click on the chosen template, you'll get an entire pre-populated presentation. This is a very simple way to create a presentation. Just replace the content with your own. This does not always work very seamlessly, however, because you're likely not going to be giving a presentation with the same regression as the sample. If you do decide to use the Slides template, try to make it your own by editing the design. Select Slide in the top menu bar, then click Edit Theme. You can edit the master presentation by clicking the slide image under Theme or individual layouts by clicking the slides themselves. Make any changes you like, such as backgrounds, placeholders, font styles, size, and color. This will apply to the entire presentation, so you won't have to edit new slides when you create them. You can, however, still make these changes on an individual basis or change your theme entirely whenever you'd like To begin adding your content, click on any placeholder or text, and replace it with your own work. Make sure the fonts all match your theme if you decide to copy and paste. To replace any images included in your template, simply right-click on the image and click on Replace Image. You will then be given a choice of location to get your new image. You can upload any images from your computer, search the web, locate an image in your Google Drive or Google Photos, paste a URL, or use your camera. Choose your image, then click Replace. This will apply the new image into the same size box as the original, so you may need to resize it using the guides. To add new content to your presentation, click on Insert in the top menu bar. Here you can insert images, text boxes, audio, video, shapes, tables, charts, diagrams, word art, and lines. Audio can be uploaded from your Google Drive, and video from YouTube or Google Drive. So if you want to use any multimedia, you'll first have to upload it online. Text boxes, shapes, and lines can all be drawn directly onto your slide and formatted using the menu that appears when you click on them, or right-click and select Format Options. Tables can be drawn using the grid provided and formatted in the same way. The available charts are bar, column, line, and pie. Choosing these will insert a sample chart that you can alter by clicking Open Source in the upper right corner of the chart. This will bring you to Google's Sheets, where you can change the data, titles, and colors of the chart. Alternatively, you can import a chart you have already created from Google Sheets. Once your slides are designed just the way you want them, you can decide to add slide transitions or animations. Done well, they can add a little bit of movement and interest to your presentation. To access transitions, select the Transition tab from the toolbar. From there, a motion menu will appear where you can select and add timings for all the transitions you'll need. Animations can be very interesting to reveal information or help to emphasize a specific point. To animate an element, first click on it, then choose Animate from the top toolbar. You will then be able to choose the controls and speed of whichever animation you'd like to use. If you have multiple animations on one slide, you can change their order by clicking on the Animations Pane button. You can preview your transitions and animations by clicking Play at the bottom of the motion menu. When your presentation is complete, it's time to begin rehearsing. The more you practice, the better you'll know the content and the technology, and you'll settle into the presentation. Thus appearing more comfortable and confident to the audience. To help you with rehearsal and eventually your final presentation, you can add speaker notes. There should be a space for them under each slide. If you don't see this, click View in the top menu, then check Show Speaker Notes. Here you can put parts of your script as prompts for yourself during the presentation, or reminders to pause for questions, or anything else you can think of adding. When the time does come to present, there are three options for presenting. The first is to just click Present in the top right corner. This will open the presentation full screen, from whichever slide you are on. If you click the drop-down arrow beside the Slide Shows button, you can start from the beginning to ensure that your presentation starts from slide 1. The last option, Presenter View, is my personal favorite. Selecting this opens two windows, one for your eyes only and one that the audience sees. The window that only you can see has a section for you to view your presenter notes for each slide. It also shows the elapsed presentation time and a drop-down menu to quickly access all of your slides. Presenter View also includes a very interesting feature called Audience Tools. Here you create a link for your audience to be able to use to interact with you and your presentation in a live chat. They can ask any questions they may have, start a discussion, or react to other audience member's comments. You can add these comments into your presentation in real time to address them specifically. You can do this either throughout your presentation or as a Q&A period. As mentioned earlier, you present in your browser in Google Slides itself. So we recommend also saving your slides as PDF files in case anything goes wrong on the day. At least in this case, you will have the slide designs and content ready to go as a backup. To do this, click File in the top menu bar, then click Download. Here you can choose the file type that you want and it will automatically download. You can also share your presentation by publishing it to the web or via searching your contacts, sharing a link, or emailing the file to yourself or any other collaborators. Congratulations, you're done! With this knowledge under your belt, you should now have the tools to create your best presentation yet.