3 Best ‘Google Slides’ Tricks To Keep Your Audience Engaged

Google Slides helps you create inspiring presentations. With Google Slides, you can create, edit, collaborate and present wherever you are. You get to choose from a wide variety of pitches, portfolios and other pre-made presentations that are designed to make your work much better. What’s more – you can also access, create and edit your presentations wherever you go, be it on your phone, tablet or even your computer. Google Slides also allows for collaboration where everyone can work together in the same presentation at the same time. But if you haven’t used Google slides extensively, chances are you never know how to use some of the coolest features to keep your audience engaged. Read on to find out 3 ways to make your content interesting using Google Slides!

1. Videos that autoplay

Isn’t it boring to listen to a presentation that has only text and nothing lively? It sure is! Why not make it interesting by adding videos in slides? Videos tend to stand out and capture the attention of your audience, more so if the videos convey the message in a crisp manner, with some comic relief added to make things more interesting. Whenever you add a video, you don’t have to stop your presentation to click on the video to play it – just use the autoplay option!

To enable autoplaying of videos on Google Slides, follow these simple steps –

1. After adding a video to a slide, click Video options from the ribbon (ribbon is located above the slide).
2. Once you see a sidebar to the right, check the box next to “Autoplay when presenting“.
3. In case you don’t want the entire video to play, you can specify the start time and the end time in the fields beneath the thumbnail of the video.

2. Speaker notes

The whole idea of creating a good and captivating presentation is to have as minimal text as possible. Graphics, pictures, charts are more visually appealing. It’s never a good idea to fill the entire slide with words, words and words. Your audience are by no means interested to listen to you speak paragraphs from the slide – instead, concentrate on placing only the most important words on the slide. In case you fear that you will run of content when presenting, you can always make use of speaker notes.

To add speaker notes to your slides, follow these simple steps –

1. Click on the text box beneath the main slide area to type notes.
2. Alternatively, you can head to Tools > Voice type speaker notes to start dictating.

Note that your notes will be visible only when you select “presenter view” from the Present drop-down menu.

3. Q&A Slide

Asking questions to the audience is one of the best ways to make the session interesting and lively. You can make full use of Google Slides Q&A feature to add Q&A section. Follow these simple steps –

1. In Slides, click the drop-down arrow next to the Present button.
2. Select Presenter View.
3. In the window that opens, head to the Audience Tools tab and click Start new.
4. A slide opens up with a URL displayed.

Audience can then visit this URL on their smartphones and type their questions, which will appear to you in Presenter’s view in real time. You can also ask the audience to vote on questions using thumbs up/thumbs down icons.

The next time you use Google Slides for your presentation, be sure to incorporate these neat tricks to keep your audience engaged!