Google on Wednesday added two new features to Google Drive slides — widescreen format and customizable master slides.
Going forward, all new presentations will be set to widescreen by default since “the majority of monitors and displays are now widescreen,” Google software engineer Michael Thomas wrote in a blog post. The new widescreen format will allow for “a ton of new space to fill with words, charts, tables, or even a simple, beautiful image.”
If the widescreen format doesn’t work for your presentation, don’t worry. You can change the size of your slides using the pull-down menu in the theme chooser, or by visiting Page setup in the File menu.
Meanwhile, you can also now tweak the preset presentation themes to customize the look of your slide deck. To do so, select “Edit master” from the slide menu, and you can, for instance, “set all of your header fonts to Alconica, make all of your first level bullets bold, and add a logo in the bottom right corner,” Google said.
When you make changes to the master slide, they will be reflected on all other slides in the presentation. “One of your top requests has been to customize these presets throughout your presentation,” Thomas said.
As you make changes to the master, you’ll be able to see how the changes look across all your slides thanks to the thumbnail previews alongside the master. Each theme has a variety of slide layouts, which can be individually customized or created from scratch.
The updates are rolling out throughout the day, Google said. For more, see PCMag’s full review of Google Drive.