Google Slides Reviews & Insights

Google Slides served as a central platform to collaborate on and organize internal presentations. It was used to share meeting content on a recurring basis, helping to consolidate communication, facilitate discussion through comments, and maintain version control of edits. Since the team was fully remote, cross-location and cross-timezone collaboration was seamless, with deeper discussions managed through comment threads. Overall, it made team-wide meetings more productive by giving people a chance to review materials and address comments ahead of calls.

Team collaboration, managing version control (where losing content is a major concern). Collaboration across organizations, or navigation collaboration between apple/windows users.

Less appropriate might be where expectations are to present a more pollished presentation (high fidelity design). Leveraging multi media tools (incorporating videos) as well as the need for offline access.

I use Google Slides daily in my current role. We leverage the tool to create slide decks and training documentation. The presentations are then used in training, internal use as well as customer facing presentations. The slide decks are a way to better communicate a large amount of information in an easy to understand way.

Google Slides is perfect for teams working on a presentation for a customer, where multiple people can be working on the same presentation at the same time. It is also helpful to see who is currently viewing the presentation and if and what they are currently editing.

Google Slides might not be the best solution for all presentations as sometimes a customer requests a live demo.

Google Slides is absolutely essential to our business driving both sales deck and production documentation.

If you’re stuck with Google Slides it’s better than dealing with non-collaborative tools

I use Google Slides when my priority is to either collaborate or share my presentation with colleagues. The major advantage is that no matter how knowledgeable the coworker is, he/she can either present or edit the presentation without having to conduct a lot of training on how to use the tool. Sharing with others is easy, and as long as the presenter has access to the internet, they can present on just about any device.

If I am unsure of how technology-friendly the coworker is, I am more likely to recommend Google Slides, as it is very intuitive for making normal to basic presentations. However, the more advanced the user, or the more specific the need, the more likely I am to point the coworker in a different direction.

Google Slides are mainly used as a means to support the online delivery of lectures and tutorials at the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. I use them to accompany live (synchronous) delivery of units for Master and Bachelor levels (Architecture). While the lecture is happening in Zoom, I share the link to my Google Slides so that students can stay on certain slides longer or skip ahead if they wish. Google Slides also allow me to add interactive links if I need students to access online polling or Miro activities. The slides can be shared beforehand, and students will have access to them after the lecture is finished, which is very handy.

Synchronous or asynchronous educational activities in the context of higher education.

Great way to support your live lectures by providing Google Slides to students so that they could follow at their own pace if need be.

I also used Google slides as a student for my Graduate Certificate in Higher Education studies and it worked perfectly for our 3-hour long zoom lectures.

We use it across the entire organization, at least amongst any business or engineering-related decisions and plans. It solves similar problems solved with any presentation-based software: communicating ideas and concepts visually, to support business decisions. Google Slides is particularly better with collaboration vs. former best in class Microsoft PowerPoint.

The best scenarios are unsurprisingly for presentations: slide decks for communicating concepts, ideas, summaries, etc. It is more of a communication tool than anything. Unfortunately, some assume it is also a good tool for workflow or flowchart diagramming and such, which it is not well suited for. It's good for 'one idea per slide', not an overall map. It's good for collaboration.

We use it for benefit presentations and benefit guides. It has so drastically simplified our processes and it makes our presentations look so slick. Our clients are impressed. We don’t have to double check two items now. We used to spend three times as much time working up both a guide and presentation but now it’s all in one and looks better too! It also has some nice features that have been helpful during the pandemic, i.e. voiceovers.

It’s great in general. I haven’t seen it be a problem in most cases but some clients like the traditional programs more and the conversion to PowerPoint looks bad… they could definitely improve that and fix some of the formatting with that conversion. The conversion to pdf is great though.

We use Google Slides across the entire organization. It is useful for cross-department and inter-team collaboration due to its easily accessible and decentralized nature. We moved from SharePoint to Google Slides because of how difficult and inconvenient it was to complete collaborative work, which disrupted productivity. Now we use Google slides for sales, bd, product, board meetings and everything in between.

It is well suited in situations where you need to make sharp, concise strategic or business presentations in a formal setting. It is useful because you can spend a lot of time to make something fancy or you can spend little time and still make something professional. It's best used when high collaboration is required to complete an important task. It is less suited for product or design brainstorming because of the limited space on slides.