Enhancing Presentations with Google Slides

Every college fest, seminar, or group project eventually lands on the same task: building a presentation that several people can work on together without the usual back-and-forth of emailing files. Google Slides was built to solve exactly this problem. It is Google’s web-based answer to Microsoft PowerPoint, and for commerce students who will spend their careers pitching ideas, reporting to teams, and presenting business plans, understanding its capabilities is genuinely useful, not just academic.

What Google Slides actually is 🔗

Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation application that lets you create, edit, and deliver slide decks entirely through a browser. There is nothing to install and nothing to save manually. Because the file lives on Google Drive rather than on a single laptop, you can open the same presentation from a phone, a cybercafé computer, or your hostel desktop and pick up exactly where you left off.

This is also what separates it structurally from desktop software. A PowerPoint file traditionally exists as one copy that moves between people as an email attachment, with each recipient editing a different version. Google Slides instead keeps a single, live copy that everyone accesses at once, with every change auto-saved and time-stamped.

Real-time collaboration: the core advantage 🔗

The feature that most clearly distinguishes Google Slides from traditional software is simultaneous editing. Multiple students working on a group assignment can open the same file and type on different slides at the same time, with each person’s cursor visible to the others in a different colour. Google positions this as central to how its Workspace apps function, noting that real-time editing removes the friction of traditional back-and-forth editing and keeps a complete version history of who changed what.

Comments, suggestions, and chat 🔗

Beyond simultaneous typing, Google Slides supports a review layer. Any team member can highlight text or an object and leave a comment, which starts a threaded discussion right on that slide. This is particularly useful when a group leader wants to flag a weak slide without rewriting it themselves, or when a professor is reviewing a submitted deck and wants to leave feedback tied to a specific point.

Live pointers and following a collaborator 🔗

Google has continued adding features aimed specifically at group work happening at the same time. One example is the live pointer, which shows collaborators exactly where a teammate’s mouse is on the screen. As Google explains, this lets co-creators point out specific text or visual elements to highlight important content during a live session. A related “Follow” option lets one person jump to whatever slide a teammate is currently viewing, which is handy during a rehearsal call before a group presentation.

Bringing content in from other sources 🔗

Very few students start every project from a blank slide. Google Slides is built to absorb content created elsewhere rather than force a rebuild from scratch.

Importing existing decks and slides 🔗

Using File > Import Slides, you can pull specific slides from an older presentation, a classmate’s file, or a company template into a new deck, choosing whether to keep the original formatting or let the slides adopt your current design. Google’s own Workspace Learning Center walks through this exact workflow, including the option to select all slides at once or keep the original theme unmodified during import. This matters for group projects where different members build individual sections that later need to be merged into one coherent file.

PowerPoint compatibility 🔗

Google Slides opens and edits .ppt and .pptx files directly, and it can also extract a PowerPoint file’s design and apply it as a theme. This two-way compatibility means a presentation built at home in PowerPoint can be uploaded, edited collaboratively online, and later downloaded back into PowerPoint format for submission, without losing formatting in either direction.

Images, videos, and data visuals 🔗

Slides supports inserting images directly from a computer, Google Drive, or a web search, along with embedding YouTube videos that play inline during the presentation instead of needing a separate window. Charts built in Google Sheets can also be linked into a slide, so that updating the underlying data in the spreadsheet automatically refreshes the chart on the slide, a useful trick for a finance or business analytics project that relies on changing figures.

Templates and themes for a polished look 🔗

Design is often the weakest part of a student presentation, not because the content is poor but because formatting is time-consuming. Google Slides addresses this with a built-in Template Gallery covering categories like business proposals, portfolios, and reports, alongside a set of default themes controlling font pairing, colour palettes, and slide layouts consistently across the deck.

If none of the built-in options fit, a theme can be imported from another Google Slides file or from a PowerPoint template, letting a college society or club reuse a fixed brand style, such as a specific colour scheme and logo placement, across every event’s slides. Editing a theme adjusts the master slide, and that change cascades to every slide using it, so a last-minute font change does not mean editing forty slides individually.

Sharing and embedding presentations 🔗

Once a deck is ready, Google Slides offers two distinct ways to distribute it, and the difference matters for business use.

Sharing a link 🔗

The standard Share option generates a link that opens the presentation in the normal Slides interface, with permission levels ranging from view-only to full editing. This is the right choice for something meant for a specific audience, such as a project report sent to a professor or a client-facing deck shared over email.

Publishing to the web and embedding 🔗

For content meant for a wider, public audience, Google Slides can be published to the web and embedded directly into a webpage using File > Share > Publish to the web. According to Google’s own documentation, this generates an HTML embed code that can be pasted into a website or blog, and any later changes to the original file update automatically in the published version within a few minutes. This is different from simply sharing a link: an embedded deck plays inline on the page itself, without sending the visitor to a separate Google Slides tab.

It is worth understanding when each method fits better. As one presentation-focused guide notes, embedding suits general information meant for anyone visiting a website, such as a company’s history or mission, while a published link is better for content aimed at a specific audience since only people with that link can view it. A business studies example: a college’s e-cell might embed a “who we are” deck directly on its website homepage, while sending a sponsorship pitch deck to a specific company as a shareable link instead.

Universities have adopted this same workflow for course content. Guidance from institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison recommends publishing the file to the web first and then pasting the generated link or code into the website’s content editor, confirming that this is a standard, low-friction method for putting a presentation directly on a page rather than linking away from it.

Why this matters beyond the classroom 🔗

For a Bachelor of Commerce student, Google Slides is not just a tool for submitting assignments. Real businesses run internal reviews, sales pitches, investor updates, and training sessions through it precisely because of the collaboration and web-publishing features covered above. Learning to structure a deck with a consistent theme, pull in data-linked charts, and decide correctly between sharing a link and embedding content is a small but genuine head start for internship and workplace presentations later.

What do you think? Between a shared link and an embedded presentation, which would you choose for a college society’s annual report meant for public viewing? And has working simultaneously with teammates in Google Slides ever caused more confusion than it solved?

References

1. https://workspace.google.com/resources/real-time-editing/
2. https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2023/09/collaborate-more-seamlessly-with-live-pointers-google-slides.html
3. https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9282978?hl=en
4. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/183965?hl=en
5. https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/embed-google-slides-presentations-online–cms-29503
6. https://kb.wisc.edu/wiscweb/120064