Slides: making a deck

Open Toolbox > Slides and pick Blank deck (widescreen 16:9 or standard 4:3) or a template. Choose where the deck lives first: Only me, Everyone in the workspace or a project. A project deck is visible to the project's people; a personal deck only to you and the people you share it with.

The ribbon

Working on the canvas

• Click to select, Shift or Ctrl click to add to the selection, or drag a box around several items.
• Drag to move. Pink guides show when an edge or centre lines up with the slide or another item; hold Alt to move without snapping. Arrow keys nudge (Shift for bigger steps).
• Drag a corner to resize (pictures and icons keep their shape; hold Shift to keep any item's shape), and the round handle above an item to rotate it (Shift snaps to 15 degrees).
• Double-click text, a shape or a table cell to type in it. Each line is a paragraph; Tab and Shift+Tab change the list level.
• A connector glued to two items follows them when they move. Drag a line's end onto an item to glue it.
• Grouped items move together and keep their spacing. Locked items can be selected but not moved.
• Copy and paste works between slides and between decks.

Charts that stay live

Insert > Chart links a chart to a range in one of your Grids (for example A1:C6) or to a chart from Charts. The slide stores the link, not the numbers: every time someone opens the deck the chart is worked out again from the source, as they are allowed to see it. Someone who cannot open the source sees Chart withheld and the reason, never an old copy of the numbers.

Saving, editing together and versions

• Changes save on their own about 1.2 seconds after you stop; the ribbon says Saving or Saved, or why a save was refused.
• Faces at the top right show who else has the deck open.
• One person edits a slide at a time. When someone else is editing a slide it shows a lock and is read-only for you; you can press Take over. A lock lapses 60 seconds after its holder stops working on the slide.
• Version history keeps up to 100 versions, grouping your edits into one version per five minutes. Save a version with a name to keep it for good. Restoring a version keeps the current state as a version first, so a restore can be undone.

Notes, comments and find

The notes pane under the slide holds speaker notes. Review > Comments adds a comment to the current slide; the author or an editor can resolve it. Find and replace (Ctrl+F, Ctrl+H) searches every slide; Replace all skips slides someone else is editing and says how many.