[music playing]

Announcer: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Melinda Holt: This first part, because we have so many people, haven't used Slides yet or don't know it, or maybe they've just used a little bit, we're going to deal with some basics, OK? And for those of you that are advanced or intermediate, hold on. Take--

[inhale]

--a deep breath. I haven't forgotten about you. I'm going to give you some advanced things as well. How do you make the toolbar appear in Slides? I have no idea.

[laugh]

Let's get back to that, all right? I think I'm going to be answering your question, Lewis. All right? I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen again. OK. We're done with this. And are you ready? Here we go.

So if you attended the Google Doc series, you know that I gave you an e-book, right? And it was made with a Google Slides, right? Google Slides can be made into a book with table of contents and links and everything that you can give to your students, and then they always have that information. And as you or I update it, it's always current. So I never have to keep sending the e-book or the Slides presentation to the people, because the people already have it, OK?

So here's the link right here. Actually, I should put in https, htt-- oops. Lowercase. OK. There we go. So that's the full address right there. You really don't need that if you're typing it in yourself, but if someone is typing that in chat, they will need the https. So https://bit.ly/slides number 2v. So it's all lowercase this time. No capital letters. But there is a number in the middle there, so let me make that red. By the way, now that I've just made a change on this, guess what? The live presentation has also got the number 2 as red.

I also want to check real quick-- don't look at what I'm doing. I mean, I know as soon as I say that, everyone's going to go, oh, let's look. I had to check the share, because I was actually playing with it last night as I was creating this.

All right. So this is the Slides presentation. Write it down off to the side. You don't need it unless you want it. If you're advanced, you might want this while I am covering some more basic functions so you can move ahead, OK? This is actually Slides! Dust 'em off and use for other things. You can do lots of things with your Slides deck besides presentation. And I see a mistake already. See how cool that is? Now it's fixed. All you have to do is hit Refresh.

[laugh]

All right? So this is the presentation name. Here's all about me. Woohoo! And yes, right here. Here are the email addresses. So mholt@scoe.net or mholt@otan.us. They are both the same. You can use either one of those.

And I want to show you this. I'm going to select one of the emails there, and I'm going to-- we're going to go over this, so don't write anything down or go, oh, I need to do it. I'm going to insert a link, and there is the address I'm going to apply.

Now for those of you that are coming into the presentation, you will have a link. It wasn't a link before, but it is now. And that is the power of an e-book. It gets updated as I update it, OK?

All of these items that are in blue are clickable. They're clickable. So if I click on Slides Defined, I can read it, and then I can go back to the TOC. Now I have to click twice, because I'm just in Edit mode. What you will be seeing-- everybody, hold on to your hats-- bing! twang!

So you'll be seeing it big like this. So again, you click once. It goes to the item. You click again, and there we go. And so you've got a TOC that goes back to this area. There are actually two pages on the TOC, because it's kind of long, OK?

There will be a preview. Oops. Or actually, this is in Preview mode. What I meant to click on was the PDF copies. I'm going to show you at the end of this webinar how to create a PDF copy. That's why I don't have it there yet. But you will be able to download a PDF copy of this Slides deck.

Anything that you download as PDF we'll be stuck in time, OK? Stuck in time. So I thought we had a-- What's a TOC? Oh my goodness. OK. TOC. TOC. There we go. Table Of Contents. OK? There we go.

All right. Now to save bandwidth, because I see my computer doing a couple little things here, I'm going to turn off my video. OK? So now you see the OTAN logo. I just saw some weird stuff flickering on my screen, so I want to make sure we save bandwidth.

All right. So here we go. If you want to follow along, don't do it yet, because I really want to make sure you know what Slides are, OK? Slides is an app. It's an app, and it's part of the G Suites tools, OK?

It can be used on any browser. And this is what people don't seem to understand. They go oh, I've got to use Chrome. I don't have Chrome. No, you don't have to use Chrome. Chrome works better with its products, with all the Google products, because Chrome is a Google. Right? So Slides is a Google. Chrome is a Google. They work really well together.

But if you have Safari or if you have Firefox or Edge or Explorer, you could use those as well. You might find out that something works not quite as well in Explorer or Edge as it does in Chrome, and that might prompt you or make you want to go ahead and install Chrome. But nine times out of 10, you're going to be fine, OK?

It can be used on any device. So you can actually install a Slides app on your device. It doesn't take up any space because it's on the cloud. As long as you don't use it offline, OK? So if you have a Slides deck like an e-book that you've shared with your students, they can open it up on their phone or their tablet or their Chromebook, laptop, or desktop. It's the same thing. Once they've signed in, they have it on all of their devices because it's on the cloud. OK?

The words-- I'm going to be using different words as I'm talking about Slides. I use the word Slides, presentation, and deck. So they all mean the same thing. The Slides, OK? They all mean the same thing. All right?

So terms to know. Here's just a few terms that you're going to be hearing and also looking for on the Slides deck or the Slides tool. The app. An app is just the short word for application. So if anybody tells you, oh, app and application mean totally different things, no, they don't. No, sorry. No. They're exactly the same thing. It's just that we've gotten lazy and we just use the word app.

Now I will give you that app usually denotes or connotes that it's on a smaller device. That's why it's a smaller word, I guess. I don't know. So we have the application on our desktop, but we have the app on our phone. They're the same things, so please remember that. Because I get a lot of questions, well, I've got the app. I don't have the application. If you have one, you have the other, OK? It's just a bigger word.

We're going to learn arrange, arranging objects. Everything on a Slides deck, everything on a Slides canvas, everything is called an object. Or if you wish, an item, OK? So just keep that in mind. So when I say we're going to resize the object, an object could actually be a text box. This is an object. See what I just did? I resized it. Now I'm going to undo it.

[laugh]

OK? That is an object. Pictures. We're used to pictures. I'm going to find one. Here's a picture right here, right? We know that this is an object. We recognize this is an object. But on Slides, you also need to recognize that text boxes are objects. Text boxes are objects. OK.

Then we've got the paint bucket. The paint bucket's up here in the tools. We're going to be going over this later. So here's just some terms. And I didn't finish this last night. Sorry. More later. OK?

[laugh]

As I think of words, I'll put them on there for you. All right? Some tips. A lot of people don't know this. There are guidelines on Slides. So before we get into this-- or actually, no. We need to keep going. Eventually, I'm going to have you open up a slide, OK? But right now, I want you to look right here.

So when you're looking at your Slides, you're going to see rulers. And up at the top, if you click on your ruler and drag it down, you see that little box is traveling up with my mouse? I'm holding down on my mouse key. OK?

So if I want an alignment exactly at two inches on the horizontal horizon, I can drag a guideline there. If I want a guideline on the vertical horizon or the vertical-- whatever the vertical, the y-- I click, hold, and drag another guideline from the vertical ruler. And I can stick it anywhere I want. So there are guidelines, OK?

Now if you look really closely, you will see some permanent guidelines on this Slides deck. I will only see those when I'm in Edit mode. They're little red, little ant trails going down. And this is what I use for an alignment. This is really important to know how to do.

These are done on master slides so that when you put it on your master slide or your master layout, it will appear on every layout. OK? So if I have another layout that looks just like this basically, I will have guides on it. And those are permanent, and they're done through the master slides. I will be showing you how to do that at some point during this series.

Using alignment lines that automatically-- oh, that's what I just covered. Using arrangement. That is really, really important as well. So I'm going to show you real quick. I'm going to put just a shape on here, OK? There's your shape. And I'm going to drag it. OK, now it's on top of my text, isn't it?

I can put it behind my text by arranging it. I'm going to go to the Arrange, I'm going to Order, and I'm going to send it to the back. Now it's appearing behind my text. OK?

So arranging is really good-- I'm going to undo that-- because if you have different objects on your slide that you want to layer-- maybe you want this one to be a different color but you want it to be behind. And you're going, OK. I'm going to take this and I'm-- no.

[frustrated noises]

How do you get the red one behind the gray one? Well, you need to order them, OK? There's actually a quick key that does this. I'm not going to share that with you yet.

[laugh]

But that's the quick and easy way to do it, all right? If you don't see rulers on your slides, here we go. And if you've already opened up a Slides deck because you're really excited and you just want to get started-- that's so cool-- what you're going to need to do is go to View.

So up at the top of your screen, if you've already opened up a Slides deck-- and if you haven't, don't worry about it, OK? We're going to get there together. But somebody's already moved ahead. So we're going to go up to the View menu and we're going to Show Ruler, and that's how your rulers get in there, OK?

All right. Now sometimes you have things on top. Yeah. So when I'm arranging, I'm still on the arrange things here. So when I click on the square, I'm actually-- do you see what's happening? I've selected this big text box. So that means the big text box is on top of the square. Yeah, I can see the square, but I can't click it. I can't do anything to it until it's on the top.

So what I need to do, instead of moving this up, instead of moving the red square up, I need to move the text box down. So again, Arrange, Order, Send to Back. Now I can select the square. This is going to be really important later, folks. And we will cover this more. I'm just doing tips real quick, but that's going to be really, really important.

When you're doing little stuff like moving things or nudging things over this way or that way, use the Shift key. It has so much magic. Oh my gosh. Magic in the Shift, let me tell you. So remember that.

We can use transparent fill in lines. We're going to be going over that. Right-clicking objects gives you lots of different options. So where you don't have to look at the menu, OK? Use that right click.

Format Options has a bunch of good things in it, so I'm going to-- you have to click on something before you see the button called Format Options, OK? There's a lot of magic in there. I'm going to be showing it to you later. But I want you to know that it's there. And we've already covered guidelines. OK. So there's some tips here. I'll probably be adding to this as well, because there's lots of tips for Slides. So some ideas for use. Presentation like this one, OK? Or an e-book. Hey, like this one.

[laugh]

OK? Badges of completion. Now you're looking at this slide, I know, and you're saying, well, I don't want a badge this big. No, no, no, no, no. You can make your slides as small or as big as you want it to be. You can make the slides as small or as big as you want it to be. OK?

You can make it eight and a half by 11, you can make it 14 by 44. You can do all kinds of things using the page layout, which again, we're going to be going over later.

You can also create things like a school brochure. You can create a newsletter that's online with pictures and everything. Badge of completion. If you click on a badge, usually you get metadata behind it that tells the people, the people like maybe the employers or another teacher that this is what my student did to get this badge. OK?

So there's lots of different ideas to use a Slides deck for besides this top one. This is what everyone thinks of when they-- oh, presentation. Yeah. Big deal. It can be used for so much more.

Flashcards. There's a flashcards deck that I created a long time ago. And what it does-- or what it did-- was goes over the pictures that you see when you're using Google. So this is what? Hmm. It's an avatar. What's this? The Google gear. What's that? It's the waffle or the app launch.

So each slide-- this, let me see-- this is copied, and then the answers are put on the copy. So it's a duplication. So here's slide, let's say, 10, and this is slide 11. 12, 13.

And then that way, you-- and if you create this as an e-book or a preview, then your students can't make a copy and get a static page. So if this was the end of the flashcards-- let me put it that way. Let's say this is the end of the flashcards, and I allow my students to make a copy of it. And then I decide, oh. I want to add more menu items, or I want to add more flashcards. They can't get this until I give them the option to make the copy again.

Whereas just like the e-book that I shared with you, it's in Preview mode. They come to it. They will see exactly what I put in every time. OK? Where does Melinda get all the icons? Melinda draws them.

[laugh]

Every one of these things. Everything that's on the Slides deck I have drawn. And that's another great thing about Slides. You can actually do a lot of your own drawings on Slides, and we will be covering that, OK?

Now here we go. Basic mechanics. We are going to create a new Slides deck. I want everyone to do this if you're following along, or if you just want to watch, that's fine. You can watch. No big deal.

The flashcard link is actually in the Slides deck, Jessica. So if you go to slide 10, flashcards is there. OK? You click on it when you're in that e-book. And I believe-- hint, hint, nudge, nudge-- maybe, I'm not sure-- I would have to check it out-- but I think you might be able to make a copy of it. So woohoo! OK? I'm not sure about that, though, so don't--

[laugh]

I'd have to go check, and that would take time, and I don't want to take time right now. All right. So the flashcards are in there because it's a link. OK? So how do we open up a new Slides deck? You can use any browser. It doesn't matter, OK? I would prefer you did not use your small device. So don't use a tablet. Don't use a phone, OK? Laptop, desktop, or a Chromebook, OK?

And go to drive.google.com. Or even easier-- even easier-- go to slides.google.com or even easier, slides.new. OK? So let me demonstrate all three of those ways really quick, because I think most of you know this already, but I just want to make sure.

So the first way, you're going to open up whatever browser you got. You're going to type in drive.google.com in the URL. OK? If you have Chrome open, you could certainly use the waffle and then click on the Drive icon. So here we are. We've got Drive open, right? You would click New, and then you select Google Slides. And then a new Google Slides presentation will open up in a new tab. So that's way number one, OK?

The other way would be to go to slides.google.com. So you would select or open up a new tab, open up a window. Go to slides.google.com, OK? And you're going to get something that looks different from Drive. What you will see is the actual app home. This is the application. This is the home of the application. I don't know how else to word it. This is Slides, OK? You are only going to see your slides here, OK? You're also going to see different templates up at the top. We're not going to cover those right now.

But you also should see a blank template. It's got a plus sign on it and it says blank. That's what you would click, OK? So instead of going to a new button and then selecting Slides, you come to slides.google.com and you select the blank template, OK? So that's way number two.

OK, what's the other way? If you're signed into Google, the easiest way to open up a new Slides deck is to type slides.new. That's it, folks. Boom! It is there! Wow. The crowd goes wild! OK? So you've got a new blank Slides all ready to rock and roll.

You don't have to save it. You can select-- or you can hit Control-S on your keyboard if you like. It does absolutely nothing! But it makes you feel better I guess, OK? You don't have to save it. It's done. It's ready to go. OK? It's also untitled. That's a problem.

[laugh]

OK? Because if all you do is slides.new, you're practicing and you go slides.new, and then you get another one, you go slides.new, now you've got four or five presentations that aren't titled. They are in your Drive. You created them. They're yours.

So the first thing you should do after you create a new Slides deck is to title it. So just click up in where it says Untitled Presentation up above the toolbar, up above where it says File, Edit, View, Insert, click up there. And if you're following along, let's just type OTAN Demo. OK? So that's what I'm going to start referring to. OTAN Demo, OK? If you want to name it something else, that's totally up to you. OK?

So while we're here, when you open up a new Slides deck, Google's going, OK. Hey, how can I help you? Here's some themes on the right-hand side, OK? So I've got a bunch of themes here. These are the standard themes that Google uses. Lots of pretty little colors and different things.

And when you select a theme, I'm going to select-- what am I going to select? I'm going to select the blue one. This used to be the only one they used to have right here.

[laugh]

Material. So I'm going to click on Material. OK. And boom. Now I've got-- this slide right here has turned blue because that's the title slide, right? But something else also happened. I have a bunch of layouts now, OK?

Now if you have selected a theme-- leave the Themes bar open, because we're going to come back to that. Up at the top of your screen, underneath the Slides Home, you're going to see a little plus sign. Don't click that. Don't click that one, OK?

There's a little arrow next to the slide-- or next to that plus sign, and it's New slide with layout. So I'm going to click that. It's just a little tiny arrow next to the plus sign. So I'm going to click that. And here are the different layouts that come with this theme. News flash. Every theme that Google has follows these layoffs.

[laugh]

So some of them may be orange. Some of them may be black. Some of them might have a line that goes across the middle. But basically, you're going to get these 10-- no, 11 slide layouts. Can we add our own special layout? Absolutely. Absolutely. Just like with that other thing that you might be using, PowerPoint.

[clears throat]

OK? So you can add layoffs. If you're never going to use this one, there is a way to take it away. When we get to the layouts or masters, I'll be showing you that.

Now I didn't want you to close the Theme area, because we're going to do something with this. But some of you move a little fast, OK? And you might have gone--

[gasp]

--I already closed it! OK. If you did, no worries. Up at the top above-- I have the ruler open, so in the toolbar, you're going to see the word Theme. Just click it and it opens back up. You can change your theme at any time.

After I've chosen my theme, I usually close that toolbar and I never come back to it again. All right? So you can turn it on and turn it off. It's just a little toggle. OK?

While we're on this Themes bar, way down at the bottom you have a big yellow button. Now I'm not going to walk you through this, so if you want to do it, more power to you. But I'm not going to answer any questions about it and I'm not doing it. I'm not going to show you how to do it, but I am going to tell you what it does.

If you have a theme that you absolutely love, you can import it by clicking on Import Theme. All right? And then you would upload. So if you have a theme in PowerPoint that you really, really like, you can import it into Google Slides.

So I'm not going to show you how to do that. You're going to have to test it out on your own. I might add that to the Slides deck later. It's a little more of an advanced thing to do. Will it come across as just like the one that you have in PowerPoint? Yes and no. OK?

[laugh]

So sometimes it does send, sometimes not so much. So you've got to figure that out. You have to figure that out. It's not perfect, OK? You're talking about two different sandboxes working together. That they work as well as they do together is kind of amazing. But sometimes, not so much. It'd be like me throwing my Google basketball to you-- whoom! And then by the time it gets to you in PowerPoint, it becomes a golf ball. Ding! OK?

So sometimes that happens. Not all the time. Sometimes just a little air's been let out of the basketball, OK? Or sometimes it's been inflated too much. But either way, you have to check it. So you can import themes.

Again, look at the Import Theme button. OK? And then to the left of it, you're going to see a little icon called Explore. OK? Now there's a couple of things that we can do here. I'm going to show you the first thing, and then we might do the second thing in a minute. OK. Click Explore.

[gasp]

(WHISPERING) Wow! Look at what happened. I got a bunch of different layouts. Right? What Google did was that it looked at what I had on my slide, which was absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, and it went, based on what you have on your slide, here are some different ideas for themes. So the Explore button is really kind of cool, because if you're not one of those artistical people and you know, I don't really like those themes that we had at the beginning, I want to do something more, this might do it for you, OK?

Notice that up at the top of the Themes toolbar, it doesn't say Themes anymore. It says Explore. Right? Because we clicked on the Explore button. Where is that Explore button?

OK. So I am going to-- here's my slide. OK? By the way, I'm going to view this at 100%. Here we go. I'm viewing my slide. All right. And I need a visual person. Alicia, is this a pretty good size, or should I make it bigger?

Alicia: If you can make it bigger, it'd be great. But I mean, it's pretty big now.

Melinda Holt: All right. Let's see. How's that?

Alicia: Good.

Melinda Holt: All right. OK. So I'm going to hit the Theme button, all right? So we have Themes open. This just gives me a way-- now Explore is always there. It's to the left. It's at the very bottom of your slide and to the left of the Import Theme, if you still have Themes open. OK? If you don't have Themes open, it's at the bottom right-hand corner of your slide. OK?

So when you click that, then you get, oh, look. It's a-- oh, ooh. Ooh, here's one with a little red bar. By the way, the themes that you see here, even the ones that we had before, you can make your own changes. So if you like this blue-- they don't name it, but this blue one here that I'm hovering around but if you want it to be green, you can change that in master slides, OK? In the master view. So lots of different things here.

Now. OK, now I'm going to freak everybody out. I'm not going to change anything. I want you all to follow along with me. OK, I want you all to follow along with me. Everybody, look at what I'm going to do first. OK? And then I'll do it again with you. All right. We'll see how this works.

All right. The first thing I'm going to do is I want an image on this slide. I want an image and I want some text. OK? I'm going to type-- what am I going to type? OK, Space. Yeah, Space. The final frontier.

OK. Everybody type that on your first slide. So if you didn't create a slide or if you didn't choose a theme, choose a theme now. OK? You should have your first slide is going to be your title slide. All right? There should be two boxes there for you. One is the (DEEP VOICE) big title and the other is the (DEEP VOICE) subtitle. So type Space, the final frontier. It'll make sense in a minute. All right? In five, four, three, two, one. OK.

Now I am going to go to Insert way up at the top of my screen. In my Menu bar, I've got File, Edit, View, Insert. And then I'm going to go to Image, and then I'm going to search the web. I know I went really fast. I wanted to. I will show it again later. I'm going to search for images. I'm going to search for Earth. I'm going to select an Earth. I'm going to hit Insert. Here's the Earth. I'm going to resize that. We are all going to do this together. OK? Here we go. The slow version.

[laugh]

Everyone click on Insert. Everyone select Image or just hover on Image. So I went to Insert, and then I'm hovering on Image, and now there's a little box that appears to the right. I'm going to click on Search the Web. That will open up a tool box or a search box on my far right-hand side. All right? I had to close mine because my would go blank. It remembered my last search. OK, fine. It remembered my last search.

OK. So you should see up at the top Search For, and there's probably a Google something in the middle, right? So where it says Search For or Search the Web, type the word Earth. Or if you want, type the word space, OK? You don't have to be exactly like me. It's OK.

Now you're going to be given a bunch of Earths, OK? Scroll down. Some of these are really cool. Wow. This one kind of looks spatial. So what you do is just click on the one that you want. Don't look too long, OK? Because we've got to keep moving. So select an image that you like.

And then you're going to see a little blue bar happen at the bottom of that bar or that pane on the right-hand side. And it should say Insert, OK? So click the word Insert. Take your hands off your mouse and give it a minute. Depending on your Wi-Fi, it might take a little longer than you think, OK? Because it could be a big image. It might be a small image. I don't know. It's an image, though, and it's going to take some time.

All right. Now we've got handles around our image, all right? There's little blue squares all around it. When you insert an image into your slide, you can grab the handle and you can resize it. You can make it any size you want. You want to make it skinny? You can make a skinny. You want to make it fat? You can make it fat, OK? Big, small, tall, whatever you want.

Now here's the thing. Most of us want to keep the aspect ratio. So I just did Control-Z a couple of times to get back to my original picture. Just Control-Z until I got back to this.

Here's the magic. Remember the magic key that I was telling you about? Does anybody remember what that is? It starts with an S. It's the Shift key. So hold down your Shift key, grab the lower left corner of your image, the left handle, and drag it down. And it will stay in aspect ratio. You don't have to worry about it getting skinny or fat or anything like that. You can drag it as big or as small as you want. OK? The Shift key.

Now let's say I want this image to move to the right just a little bit or to the left just a little bit. You're going to use your arrow keys to do that on your keyboard. So I think it's 10 pixels. It might just be five. But you're going to hit your arrow key, and it will nudge over. And if you just hold down your arrow key, it travels. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And you go back down, and you go-- you can move it anywhere you want. OK?

But what if I want it to go just a little bit further and when I hit my arrow key, it goes too far? But I just want it to go just a little further and it goes too far. So how do you do that? How do you get it to go just a little bit further? I wish I knew.

[laugh]

What happened? Here we go. Hang on. Oh, they changed it. I'm using some key combinations. Hang on a minute. There we go. OK. All right. So let's say I put this image right here, and it's next to Space, right?

But I want the edge of Space to be right on the e, right? I want to be right there. And when I hit my arrow key over-- I have to select the image-- when I hit the arrow key, it covers it up. That's not far enough. That's too far, OK?

So again, the magic is in the Shift. So you're going to hold down your Shift key and then use your arrow to nudge it one-- it's called a pixel-- one pixel at a time. Boom! And that, my friends, for those of you that are intermediate and advanced, is an advanced feature. Use your Shift key to nudge. It is a beautiful thing, whatever you want to nudge. Remember, the text is an object, so I can nudge my text over as well by selecting the box.

You hit the Shift key. You don't hit the Shift key, Jacqueline. You hold it down. So to resize, you select the image, hold your Shift key-- just hold it down-- and then use-- so you have to have both your hands working. And then you drag the handle with the mouse, OK? If you're using a touchscreen, you hold down the Shift key with one hand, and then you would touch the appropriate handle, wherever you want, and nudge it. OK?

So that's how you move an object and that's how you nudge it. We're just going to hold down the Shift key, and we're just going to use the arrow keys just to get it right there.

All right. Now, we have a slide. And by the way, I decide I don't want space right there. We have a slide. We have a picture on it. We have a slide with a word on it. It's going to make sense to Google when it explores. Everyone, look at-- don't touch it. Don't touch it, but look at your Explore button. It turned a color. It's now gold. And that means Explore has an idea. (WHISPERING) Wow. So let's find out what the idea is. I'm going to hit the Explore button.

[gasp]

Whoa! Look at that! Now I get a bunch of different ideas based on not only the picture, but the text. So what they did was they took the picture and they made different layouts with it. How cool is that? I don't have to think about nothin'.

[laugh]

All I've got to do is put a picture on it with some text, and boom! There is my new layout. How about that? Nice, huh? All right. So that's the Explore tool and you have just created a-- you've just created a presentation. It's only got one slide--

[laugh]

--but it's got text, it's got an image, it's got all kinds of good things. It's got a nice layout. They made the image as big as the page for the layout that I chose, OK?

Now here's the thing. We want to make this accessible, OK? We want to make sure the people that are not as fortunate as we are, they're not as sighted as we are, we want to make sure that they get the information that's on this Slides deck as well.

The words, no problem. A screen reader can read those words. But a screen reader can't read this image, no matter how big or small it is. So what we're going to do now-- and everyone follow along, please-- we're going to right-click on the image, wherever the image is at on your Slides deck, and we're going to go to Alt Text. So right-click, Alt Text. Click that.

A little box comes up, and you're asked to put in a title and a description. And it tells you, alt text is accessed by screen readers for people who might have trouble seeing your content. Right? So title, Space.

Description. You can get as broad a description or as minimal a description as you wish. Just think about, who's going to be looking at the slide? Or better yet, think about who's not going to be able to see the slide? Put your hands over your eyes and then tell me, what's on the slide? OK? Just type that out. Let's see. We've got--

[muttering]

It's the first time I've done this one, so I don't know quite how to describe it. I missed all the text. Where is text? Oh, alt text. Right-click on your image, Laura. Go to your image. Right-click on it. Or maybe click it first and then right-click it so that you know it's selected. And then you should see alt text in-- oops. So I've clicked on the image. I right-click. And then it says, see, one, two, three, four, five, six. It's the sixth option down. OK?

How did I get the image to cover my whole slide? I used Explore, OK? I used Explore. And this is the great thing about Explore. It didn't do anything to the image that I couldn't do. OK? Here's my image right here. What it did do was make the background black when I chose my special layout from Explore. And then it broadened this image to the full size of the Slides deck, OK? I just happened to choose a really good space.

[laugh]

So it just depends on the slide or the Explore theme that you selected. So again, alt text. You're going to right-click on-- click the image, then right-click it. You should see alt text. Give it a title. Space image, image of Earth with space. And that should be enough. Boom. So when the screen reader comes to it, they'll be able to read that, OK?

All right. Now when you use Explore, what it does is it created a custom layout for you. How do I know that? Because I went to the arrow next to the plus sign. So look on the far left-hand corner of your Slides area, the application. Underneath the Slides image is a plus sign. Next to the plus sign is the arrow. That's where all of your layouts are, OK? So it gave me or it created a custom layout for me.

Remember, I had already selected that blue one, right? So the Explore-- it didn't create me a bunch of new layouts. It created me a custom layout for my title slide. I can do this for every single slide if I want to. And as I'm creating, I can use the Explore tool every time. That gets really kind of labor-intensive.

[laugh]

So I don't do it all that often. I try to stick with the layouts that are in the themes, and then I will edit them, OK? Do we have any questions so far about what we just did? We added a title slide, right? We looked over themes. We used the Explore button. We added an image. And actually, we did the opposite. We added an image and then we used the Explore button. Now we have a custom layout. Any questions on that?

Alicia: Melinda, there's a question real quick on how to right-click on a Mac laptop.

Melinda Holt: On a Mac laptop?

Alicia: How do you right-click--

Melinda Holt: Two finders. Two fingers. Try two fingers on the keypad and that should do it. Do Explore themes go into the e-book without difficulty? Sure, Shirley. You can use Explore themes if you wish. I don't. I actually create my own layouts, because I'm anal.

[laugh]

Because nobody can do it as good as me. So I actually create my own layouts and I hardly ever use Explore. But I know teachers do. That's why we show it.

Where does alt text show up? How does one see it during the slides presentation? Randy, you won't see it. It's not there for you to see. It's there for people who can't see to use it. So when you create a PowerPoint or when you create a Slides deck, you should always put alt text in for images so that if you give the PowerPoint or if you give the Slides deck to somebody, if you give them a copy of it, and they don't see well or they're blind and they have a screenreader, the alt text will be there for them, OK? That's why you would use alt text.

I don't see how to cover the whole slide. Sandra, that was part of my Explore. So if you want to see how to cover the whole slide, here's the image right here. And I know you can't see it. Hang on. To describe that-- here we go-- I'm going to actually add another layout. Hang on. Hang on.

So here's an image, yeah? I'm going to use the handles, and I'm going to drag up, and I'm going to resize, and I'm going to drag it down. This is how you make an image take up the whole slide.

How come mine did it in one click? Because I used the Explore tool, OK? Now you don't have to use the Explore tool. You could do it just the way I did just now. You could just drag the handles and do whatever you want. OK? So I'm not going to go deep into alt text.

[laugh]

OK? I want you to know that you can-- alt text, you can right-click on an image, go to alt text, and then you can describe there what it is. Every image on your slide in theory should have alt text. If you are funded by-- God, it's getting way too deep into alt text, OK? It's a good thing to do.

Maybe later on we can discuss alt text. We might even have a session on accessibility. I'm hoping to get somebody to do that through OTAN. So this is all about accessibility, OK? I'm not going to go deep into it. My job here today is just to go over slides, OK?

My arrows to the left of plus sign are Undo and Redo. No! No, M Claire. I can't zoom in here, because Google's going to do something weird-- oh, here we go. There. There. There we go. All right.

So underneath the Slides Home, you've got File, Edit, View, and then whatever's there. Here's the plus sign, OK? And then we have the arrow next to the plus sign. That is where all of your layouts are at. OK? And if you don't see that, then that tells me you're either on a tablet or an Android, OK? Wondering when you would use that for what purpose? OK.

[laugh]

Alt text is used for accessibility. If your students don't need accessibility, then you might not use it. It's always a good idea to have it so that if somebody by chance gets to your slides and they want to be able to get the information, they're not going to be able to get the information for-- let me give you a really good example.

Alicia: Melinda? Sorry. I think Laura was asking-- she wrote down a couple more. The part about picture covering a text of a slide. That's why she was wondering what--

Melinda Holt: Oh, why would you do that? It's just for-- yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. Again, it was an idea of how to create a really cool-looking title slide. So you know, Space, the final frontier.

[singing]

Right? That's why you would do it. OK, so I don't have to-- OK. Can you put text over an image? Absolutely. We haven't done that yet. How to change an image after using the Explore tool. You click on it and you can do anything you want to it, sunflower. OK? You can move it around. We're going to be going over more options on how to manipulate images in a little bit. And how to change image. Good. OK. All right. Cool.

Now I'm going to go back to the e-book to figure out what I'm supposed to cover next. We've done this. We've created a new slide, right? There's instructions here on how to create using the app. We already went to-- I showed you Slides Home, right? Themes and Explore, we just went through there. Yeah? OK.

Now adding a new slide. Everyone, go to your slide, your OTAN demo. All right? And I'm going to get rid of that, and I'm going to get rid of this. OK. So we have our first title slide. Let me get back to square one. OK.

How do you put text over an image? That was one of the questions we had. Here's my text, right? Here's my image. How did I get my image to be in back of my text? Well, let me show you the reverse. Now it's in front of my text.

[gasp]

How did I do that? Now it's in front or in back of my text.

[gasp]

How did I do that? I did it really quickly using key combination. Let me show you the toolbar first. So select your image, OK? Go to Arrange in the toolbar. Go File, Edit, View, whatever. Arrange. And then go to Order.

Now mine is already in the back, so it can't go much more back then back is. Back is back, and that is that, OK? So it's already sent to the back. If your image is in front of your text, then you would go to Arrange, Order, Send to Back. OK?

You can also do it in the opposite way, OK? Let's say my image isn't so big so that when I click on the text box-- see, I clicked on the object of text. This is an object. I clicked on the text object called Space, all right? And I know that, because it's got this really long box here, and I can add more to it if I want. Whoops. All right? So this is a text box.

Now what if I wanted this text box to be behind the text, or behind the image? I wouldn't really, but I wanted to show you this. So you go-- you click on the text box, you go to Arrange, you go to Order, Send to Back, right? Wow. Like that.

OK. Now you're going, well, why would you do that? Because I wanted to show you that you don't have to do it in the order that you think you should, OK? Sometimes you can't find the-- I'm going to make this smaller. It'll make sense in a minute. OK. Where'd my text go? It's behind my image. Well, all I can do is click my image, so I can't bring my text to the front. How do I get my text to the front?

[high-pitched noises]

Right? How do you get your text to the front? By sending the image to the back. OK? Send the image to the back. So I've selected the image. Go to Arrange, Order, Send to Back.

Now this seems very, very simple. And you're going, God, why does she keep going over this? Because there's going to come a time, I guarantee you, where you're going to have some objects, and one is appearing in the front and you want it to go to the back and you can't select it. So you need to think the other way. Instead of sending it to the back, what can you bring to the front?

[laugh]

All right? You need to think the other way. Sometimes it's not sending that main thing to the back. It's getting a secondary thing to the front. OK? All right.

Let's add a new layout. So if I click the plus symbol next to-- where it says New Slide, I'm going to get a new slide, OK? Now I'm going to do that again, just to show you that the exact same slide comes up twice. Well, I don't want this one to be like this one. I want it to be different.

Google is remembering, OK? Google is remembering. So when you create that first new slide or you create a layout-- let's say-- let me get rid of these. Let's say I go to the arrow next to my plus symbol and I choose this layout, title only. OK. I'm going to type Title Only. OK?

If I click the plus sign, I'm going to get the exact same layout, because Google remembers. And Google's going, oh. OK. You started with this layout, so we're going to just keep giving it to you until you tell us to change it. OK? So if you don't like the layout that you got when you selected the plus sign, there's a couple of things you can do.

Number one, don't use a plus sign. Let me undo this. OK. Don't use a plus sign. After you finish adding your text or your images or whatever to a slide, go to the arrow next to the plus sign, and then choose your special layout, OK? If you didn't want this title only one, you wanted one-column text, then you can select that. OK?

Or let's say, oh, man. That's not the one I wanted. I wanted the other one next door. You don't have to delete this and then go back and use the layout or the New Slide function. You could, on the far left-hand side, you're getting all your slides in a pane, OK? This is your slide pane. My arrow's going up and down.

Right-click on the slide that you want to change and apply layout. OK? So if you chose one-column text or any layout and you don't really want that layout, you're going to right-click on the slide within the slide pane and then select which layout you want from Apply Layout. Boom. And then it will change.

And if you've added any text, here-- here's some text. And I changed the layout. If I apply a different layout, you're going to right-click on the slide in the slide plane-- pane.

[laugh]

I'm going to-- the rain in the plain-- I'm going to hit Apply Layout, and then I'm going to go to a different layout. Boom. Notice that here's some text is still there where the title is on this layout. OK?

How can you share your slides the easiest way to your students. OK. The easiest way to share would be to preview, and that is in the e-book, (INAUDIBLE). So check out the e-book. Go to Preview on the sharing. I think it's on the second page of the TOC. I'm not going to cover that yet. That's down the road on my end. OK? But there are instructions there.

All right. So we've changed the layout. There's another way to change the layout without selecting any objects. So let's say I'm on this slide, and again, I don't like this layout. I want another one. So I'm just making sure that I'm not selecting anything. I'm not selecting text. I'm not selecting anything. I'm just clicking on some blank space. That's important. You have to click on blank space.

Then up at the top, above my ruler, I see the word Layout. OK? This is just like applying a layout. Boom. OK? By the way, the text box is still there. It's just that Google or this slide didn't know what to do with it. So it kept the text box, but it made it white. OK? You have the power, all right? So here's a text box. I'm going to make it a different color than white so that I can see it. All right.

Let's do some more stuff on this slide. Here's some text. We are going to add some shapes. We're going to add some shapes. So someone asked earlier, where does Melinda get all of those drawings? Melinda draws them all. I used to spend a lot of time at the airports.

[laugh]

I don't anymore. But I have a lot of images. And I looked at something and went, oh. I wonder if I could draw that. And I did. OK? And I did using two tools, the shape tool and the line tool in Slides. These options are also in the Drawings tool that is available if you go to drawings.google.com. Don't do that. You've got it right here. There's another reason to go to Drawings, which is discussed maybe in Series 2 or 3. Who knows?

So I'm going to click on Shape. Now the Shape tool has a circle and a square. Don't be fooled by that, because there are lots of shapes. Many, many, many, many, many shapes. So here are all the general shapes. And there's a lot of them, yeah? There's also a bunch of arrows. You never have to draw an arrow again. Oh my God. Look at all of them here!

There are callouts, little bubbles and everything. It's really cool. For those of you that are math teachers, oh. What a boon! Oh my gah! Look at all this stuff here! Yeah? OK.

So what I want you to do is go to the Shape tool, OK? Just for grins and giggles, please choose the same shape that I am going to choose, OK? So that I can explain this. And then you can choose any shape you want. All right? The reason I'm going to show you a specific shape is because I want to show you what it can do, and what some of the other shapes can do.

So we are going to select what looks like the little Pac-Man, OK? It's actually a pie is what it says here. So I'm going to click on the word or the shape pie. So it's the third image down on the far left. OK? So I went to Shapes. I went to Shape, and then I selected the pie.

Now my cursor has turned into a crosshair, right? So I'm going to click, hold, and drag it down, and I've created a pie. I've created the image that was the same shape. I'm going to undo that and show it all over again.

I went to the Shape tool. I'm going to Shapes. I'm going to select the pie. I turn into crosshairs. Now because I want this image to be exactly the same ratio, those two by two or one by one or three by three, I'm going to hold down my Shift key while I'm drawing. And this will stay exactly square. I know it's a round shape, but it's square. All right?

If it's not, if I don't hold down the Shift key, I could end up with something that looks like this. And maybe that's OK. Maybe that's not a bad thing. All right? But if I want it to be square, I would hold down the Shift key as I was drawing it.

OK. So on this slide, I have some text and I have an image. Everyone, click the pie and make it yellow. Any kind of yellow you want. OK? Now click on the image. Go to the Paint Bucket. That's where I made it yellow. I should have said that. So we clicked on the image. We go up to the Paint Bucket.

Now you selected yellow, because you were on the Solid tab. Right next to the Solid tab, you're going to see Gradient. So I'm going to select the word Gradient, and now I'm going to select one of these yellows here, this little gold yellow. OK? It also gives me some other options that also are with my theme. So my theme has colors. So I'm going to select one of those. OK? So it gives it a little more depth. Looks pretty cool.

Everyone, select your pie after you've made it yellow. OK? Just click on it and look at it for a minute, because you're going to see two different handles there. They're gold. Let me zoom in here so you can see it, if I can get my zoom to work. Here we go.

When I select an image, right here I have a gold handle. The Paint Bucket is up above your slide, Laura. On mine, it's kind of underneath the Tools menu. So I see File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, blah, blah, blah. There's a Paint Bucket. If you don't see it, it could mean that you have the menu hidden. So on the far right-hand side underneath the Share button, there's a little arrow, and you can hide menus, OK? That didn't take away my Paint Bucket, but try that.

All righty. On this image, we have gold handles. I wonder what those do. Well, number one, I see that my cursor turns into a crosshair when I hover over them. Either one. Right? So I'm clicking on it. It's not doing anything. Hmm. Maybe if I drag it at the same time--

[gasp]

Look at that. Wow. So whenever you see a gold handle on an image, you can drag it and it will change the image. Isn't that cool? That's so cool. OK. So look at this image that I've drawn here. Make something similar. There's a method to the madness.

[laugh]

All right? All right. Now we have our image selected. Our image has a black line around it. All images normally do until you start showing Google that you don't want it, OK? And by showing Google that you don't want it, you keep taking away the line.

[laugh]

OK. Or you make it transparent. So select your image. I don't want there to be a black line around here. I'm selecting the image. I'm going up to-- it looks like a little Pencil next to the Paint Bucket, and it's called the Border Color. So we're going to click on that, and you get the same colors, basically, that you do with the Paint Bucket.

There is no gradient. You can't have a gradient line, OK? But you can have a blue line going around this pie, or you could have a yellow line. You could try and match the same yellow. Or if you don't want a line to appear at all, you select Transparent. Boom. Now there's no line. OK?

There may come a time where you are layering images that you don't want that black line or the blue line or the red line, whatever color line. You can change it. You can make it transparent. You can do all kinds of things with a line, or not. It's up to you, OK? All right. So that should have given everybody enough time. You should have an image that looks something similar to this, right?

All right. Let's everyone go back up to your Shape tool. How to remove the black line again. Yes. OK, I've selected the shape. You have to select the shape. OK? You're going to go up to the Pencil.

All right. Now if you have a black line, the Pencil-- there should be a border color there that's black. If you click on the Pencil, you can choose any color you want. You can make it pink, and you'll notice that the pink color now appears underneath my Pencil. That looks really bad. OK. That's not a good color combination, so don't do this at home. Click on your Pencil and click the word Transparent. Boom. Now the color's gone. Now I don't have that line again, or anymore, OK?

All right. Now we're going to click on our-- we're going to click off of our image, OK? We don't want it selected. We want to click off of it. Just click on the white area or whatever area off to the side.

I want you to hit your Shape tool again. I want you to go to Shapes, and then we're going to select a circle, which is right below-- there's a square line, and then right underneath the squares are circles. OK? So select a circle.

Now on top of the shape that you've already created, I want you to draw just a little circle. You should see where I'm going with this, right? We got a little circle. Google automatically colors most things for you based on your theme or sometimes based on the last shape that you drew. It just varies. Most of the time, it will appear as a light blue with a black line around it like this, OK?

So we want to change that. You can change the colors anytime you want. You can even create your own colors, by the way. So we're going to click on this little dot in the middle of our pie. I'm going to go to Gradient, and I'm going to choose just kind of a grayish, blackish whatever. OK? And I'm going to remove the line around it.

Everyone should have a similar-looking image. Right? And I don't know if you were around in the '80s. You should also know that this is kind of a Pac-Man-looking image. OK?

Now if you don't have text on your layout already, I want you add some text. You can always add text above and beyond what has been put on the layout. OK? The way you do that is you go up to the Text tool or the text box. The text box is between the arrow and the Insert Image. You could also go to the Insert button or Insert menu, click it, and then click on Text Box. So there's lots of ways to do the voodoo.

As soon as you insert any kind of object or as soon as you tell Google you want to insert an object, you get crosshairs. So we're going to draw across the slide a little bit. Google creates a text box for us. And then we can type some text. You can type whatever you want. I'm typing, watch out! Here comes Pac-Manic. OK.

All right. Now I did this so I could show you, I want this text to be right here. Pac-Man's going to be eating it, OK? I could move Pac-Man down or I could move the text up, right?

Let's try moving Pac-Man down. So click on your image and drag Pac-Man down. Something wrong happened. Something not right happened. Gradient is under the Paint Bucket, Frances. So go to the Paint Bucket, and you'll see Gradient next to Solid. So Solid is where all the colors are. Gradient is right next door. It's a tab.

So when I moved the pie, the Pac-Man shape, the eyeball didn't go with it, did it? That means I have to move the eyeball too? I've got to move two separate things at two separate times? No, you don't.

So everyone, move your Pac-Man back. Hit Control-Z. If you followed around or followed me, he hit Control-Z and your Pac-Man should go back where you had it. OK?

Inserting text. Sandra, go up to Insert, Text Box. Insert, Text Box. OK? So Insert right here. Text Box. And then drag the crosshairs on the slide, and then type.

OK, back to Pac-Man. What I want to do is I want to make both of these images move at the same time, which means I have to group them. They have to become groupers. OK?

There's a couple of ways to do this. If you have a lot of stuff on your slide, you might want to click, hold your Shift key, and then click so that you select both images. So what I did was I clicked on the Pac-Man, I held down my Shift key, and I clicked on the eyeball. OK? And if I look really close, I could see that it's selected, because there's a blue highlight around it, OK? So that's one way to do it. You Shift-click both your images, or three images, or four images for what we're about to do.

The other way to do it-- I've got a lot of space here. I'm not going to be hitting anything else, so I can click, hold, and drag my mouse off from one side into the image. Now do I have the whole Pac-Man selected? No. Look over here. Look. I clicked, held, and dragged my mouse down to where I know the eyeball is within the sphere of influence, and I know part of the Pac-Man image is within the sphere of influence of what I'm selecting, right? And as soon as I let go of my mouse, they are both selected. They are both selected.

So you could drag a big box around it like this to select it if you want, but the reason not to do that is if I do this, then I've selected the text box too because the text box is so close to it. So there are going to be times where you're going to want to use that Shift-click method that I was telling you about, or just get enough of the image that you're selecting, and then it selects.

Now why do we select this image? Because we want to arrange it so that it is grouped. We want to arrange it-- hint, hint, nudge, nudge-- we want to arrange it so that it is grouped.

So I've got both my images. I've got the little Pac-Man guy. Got his eyeball. I'm going to go to Arrange. And in this menu, I have the word Group. Boom. It doesn't look like it did anything, but it did. Because when you drag your image now, it goes-- come on-- it goes as one. OK? So I can drag Pac-Man anywhere I want now. I can drag the text box anywhere I want. Bada bing, bada boom.

So we've drawn-- we've created a new layout. We've drawn an image. A very simple one, but we've drawn an image. It's also a layered image, whether you realize it or not. You've got two images there. One's on top of the other.

You should know by now how to arrange your images. So you should know how to make Pac-Man's eyeball on top by using the Order function. Now you're not going to have order right now by the way, because it's grouped, OK? Which also leads me to if you ever want to ungroup something, you can. You just select the image and then hit Ungroup. Now they're separate. Any questions on what we've done so far?

[singing]

No?

Alicia: We're all good. Everybody's super hard at work.

Melinda Holt: Nice.

Alicia: Nothing in the chat. It's good.

Melinda Holt: Yeah. So we've added a new slide. We've done a couple of things on it. We've even added images. Now we've inserted an image, OK? There are instructions here.

Couldn't get the group function to work. OK. Normally, the reason you can't get a group function to work is because, first of all, it's already grouped, OK? Or second of all, you don't have all of the shapes selected.

So I'm going to go back to my slides. I'm going to draw two different images again. I'm going to do two different shapes. And I tell you what. I'm going to give you guys some time. I want you to draw on-- whatever layout you have, I want you to draw a couple more things. So I'm going to do a little triangle here and maybe another triangle.

By the way, if you have the same image that you've-- or you've got an image in your head, let's pretend. You've got an image in your head, and it's basically the same shape repeated over and over again. Guess what? You can click on a shape, you can copy it, and then you can paste it. So Control-C, Control-V, right?

There we go. So I've got an image, OK? And it kind of looks like a tree, doesn't it? Except the front of the tree really should be in the back, shouldn't it? Yeah, I think so. And I want it to be green. But I want all of them to be green.

So I'm going to select each one separately, or I could select a couple at the same time by using the Shift-click method, OK? And then I'm going to go to Gradient. And because I said green, there we go. And I'm going to select this one. So I'm getting all of my colors done. All right? Now I want this guy in the front to go to the back. So I could go to the Arrange tool and I could do the Order, and I could use the Send Backward function.

[gasp]

But look. There's magic here. Right here. It's really small on your screen, I know. But if you're looking at your own, it says, Send Backward and it gives you the key combination. So the key combination here is Control and the arrow key down. So if I want to send something backward, the quickest, easiest way to do it is to click the image, hit my Control key, hold it down, and then hit my arrow key down once. My down arrow key. Now it's in the back.

And by the same token, I can put something in front using the up arrow. So I'm going to hit the Control and I'm going to arrow up. Don't make a liar out of me. There it is. OK? So this one now. I'm in this one right here. I want it to go into the front. And that's kind of hard to see, isn't it? Come on now. There. OK. So I'm going to make this one yellow so you can see how they're arranged. There we go. All right. Could not make two triangles. OK. You can't make two triangles? OK, really, only need to make one.

[laugh]

Because then you can copy and paste. So go to your Shapes tool. Click on Shapes. Select any image. Doesn't have to be a triangle. It could be anything, right? And then you're going to make that shape, dragging and cross your canvas here, all right? Ooh, I have a gold handle. What does that do? Look at that. It makes it into a triangle. Look. Isn't that cool? Or a square.

All right. So here's your image. You're going to select it. You've selected the image. We're going to hit Control-C on our keyboard. Looks like it didn't do anything, but it did. I'm going to click somewhere on my canvas. It doesn't matter where. And then I'm going to click-- or hold on to my keyboard again Control-V, V as in victor. And there's my second image.

So if you were only able to draw one triangle, again, you can always go back up to the shapes tool. You can draw the image, the same image over and over and over again if you wish. Good practice. OK? Or if you don't want the practice, you select your image, Control-C, and then Control-V. Or if you like using your menu items, you can select the image, go up to Edit, Copy, then Edit, Paste. Then you get your other shape. OK? Command-C, Control-C. Yeah. When I say Control, I'm actually on a Mac.

[laugh]

But I have a PC keyboard. All right? Because I'm just funny that way. So yes, when I say Control, just in your brain, if you're on a Mac, transpose the word to Command, OK? All right.

Something else that I did not show you on images is the Rotation option, OK? Now I've got an image. Choose any one of the images you have on your side. OK, I'm going to choose this one. I'm going to make mine bigger so that you can see it. You don't have to make yours this big. I just want you to see it.

All right. Now I've got handles all the way around my image, right? And tell you what. Just so we can see it real good, I'm going to make the border big. There we go.

OK. So here's my image, OK? There are handles all the way around. And right on the top, there's this little line that's sticking out with the little blue circle. Does everyone see that? So you choose your shape. You should see a little blue circle up at the top of your image. All of your images will have that, this little blue circle up at the top, OK?

If you put your mouse, your cursor over that little blue circle, it turns into a crosshair. That means it's going to do something. (SOUTHERN ACCENT) And what it's gonna do, it's going to rotate. It's gonna rotate your image. I don't know why I went into this accident. I have no idea. I apologize if it offends anybody. It just went there. So we gonna rotate this, OK?

All right. So I'm going to hold on to the little blue circle, and I'm going to drag it. And do you see the numbers that are appearing? It tells me what degree I am going in. Now if you want something to be exactly 45 degrees, this is going to drive you nuts, because you're not--

[muttering]

Ooh, no. Yep. Oh. Look at that. I hit it. OK? That's very rare, all right? What you might want to try considering is using the magic tool on your keyboard called-- starts with an S-- Shift. So while you are dragging your image or rotating your image, while you're rotating it, first, before you start rotating, hit your Shift key. And then rotate it, and it will go by 15-degree increments. Bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom, bom. OK? 15 degrees every time.

All right. While we're here, I'm going to show you some other magic. This magic will work on all objects, including text. OK, so I'm going to drag my text box up here so you can see that too.

OK. So here's some magic. Everyone, select an image. Now up at the top of your screen, if you have an image selected, you're going to see a button called Format Options. Click it. You're going to see a bunch of functions appear on the right-hand side. One of them is Size and Rotation, OK?

And there's an arrow next to it, right? So select the arrow next to Size and Rotation. Now I can tell exactly how big this image is. I can lock the aspect ratio so that if I make the width smaller, the height will be incrementally made smaller as well. OK?

I can also manipulate the object right here by typing in, I don't want it two by two or 2.2. I want it 2.8. To many points. 2.8. Boom. And that, to the degree, to the 0.100th you can get your image the exact size you want it to be. You can also do it by scale, all right?

Why would you want something like this? Well, let's say I made a copy of this image, and then I started messing around with it and it was like, oh, man. I want them to be the same size. So you look at this one. OK, 2.8, 1.79. And this one is 1.58, 1.26. So we go back here. 1.58.

There will be times when you will have to do it by typing instead of by copying and pasting. 2.6 1.26. Oops. Have to make sure you type in the right number. There we go. Now I know that they are exactly the same size. I know that because I have the size and rotation up here.

How do you get to Format Options? You select an object. It could be text. It could be an image. It could be anything on your slide. And then you're going to see the Format Options button up at the top within the same line as the bold and the text and the bullets. It's way to the right of the-- what is this? The Paragraph tool. Yeah, text direction, OK? So select an object. Go to Format Options. I could have selected text. A text box is an object.

Now we have an object selected, right? Objects or shapes have different options in the format options than text boxes do, OK? And pictures have different options as well, and videos have different options. So when you add things to your slide, you can add audio. You can add video. You can add anything you want. When you click Format Options, you're going to get different menus for each different thing that you add, OK? Just keep that in mind.

Right here, I've got my Shape tool. I can put a drop shadow on it. You can choose the color of your drop shadow. I've got a red line around it, so let's make it a little pinkish. I always blow out the distance.

And here's the thing, folks. These are really, really hard to see. There's a little square. You might have to lean forward into your screen to see them. I always do. But there's a little square here in the distance, and I can drag it. And the transparency is really kind of-- there we go. There is the shadow right here. Now I can change the angle of it by clicking the square in the angle.

If, say there's 221 degrees right there. While the-- after I have selected it, I can use my arrow keys to go 222, 223, 224. I'm not moving my mouse. I'm using my keys. I'm using my arrow key to move the square.

So once you find that square, you click on it, you can use your arrow keys to move the distance, the blur radius. Play with it. I'm not going to describe each one of these. You'll get an idea of what it does when you start playing with it. That's the best way to learn is to play. Right? Can you get an Amen on that? Amen. OK, yay! All right.

So lots of different colors. You can even make your own color if you want by going to Custom. Not going to go over that too much today. But you can get-- you know, you can actually set depth a little bit by making it the same color as the object when you do a drop shadow.

So right there, I had a red line on it. Now it looks like it's a thick-- what is this? A trapezoid or something? Whatever that is, OK? It looks thick now, because I made the drop shadow-- it's not transparent. It's solid now, because I could drag it way over here and it disappears.

But I don't have any transparency. I have the angle set at-- where's my square? Here it is. To 300 and whatever it is. 65. OK. The distance, I can make it as thick or as thin as I want. Look at that. Isn't that cool? OK?

And the blur radius. You don't want too much of a blur if you're trying to get thickness out of it. But you could. Now it looks like it's fading into the background, OK? So blur radius is pretty cool too. So that's one way of putting an object on there and getting some thickness out of it. Drop shadow.

Now all objects when you're working with slides, all objects have the capability of having text. This is a text box. That makes sense. A text box can have text. This is a shape. And guess what? It's an object. And it too can have text. This is text.

So when you double click in your shape, you can add text to it so that when I drag it around, the text follows it. And I'm going to make this a little more math-ish. This is a square, actually, because it's got four sides. I know some math stuff. I know it's not exactly a square, but you get the point, right?

[laugh]

OK. And again, if you don't like the color, use your Paint Bucket, right? If you have a red line, I would strongly recommend you do not use a yellow background, because that just blows people away. Let's use blue. There we go. OK? So different ways to make your image more than what it was by using a drop shadow.

Text fitting. Oh my God. When I first found this, this was like (SINGING) hallelujah! The sun was bright. The heavens were singing, because have you ever-- if you view Slides before and you haven't used a text fitting, let's say you make the text fit in there, and you have to make your image-- oh, man. I want square to show up on the same line and you're trying to-- oh, man. Oh, man. And it won't-- oh, there.

But I don't want the image that big, right? I just need a little-- I need it not to take up so much space. I need it not to take up so much space, which is actually the padding.

So what I do is I click on the object. I go to Format Options. I hit Text Fitting. And then I set the padding to zero. (SINGING) Ha, ha, ha! And then I can make my object a little smaller and the text stays in the same light. Oh my God, this is so cool. You'll understand that later when you start working with objects.

[laugh]

Alicia: Melinda, time.

Melinda Holt: It's a really cool function. All righty. OK. Thank you, Alicia. All right. So we've done-- can you add a picture in a shape? You can, and it's called masking. And that's actually going to be the last thing that I'm going to show you.

So I'm going to select all of these objects here, and I'm going to get rid of them. If you have an image, you can insert it in a slide. There's a couple ways to do it. If you have an image on your-- you know, I'd better not do that one.

[laugh]

On your desktop, if you have an image on your desktop, you can click, hold, and drag it onto your slide. You see how there's a little green plus sign there. I clicked, held, and dragged from my desktop, and I'm letting it go. There I am, OK? You can do it that way.

Or you can go to Insert. OK. You're going to go to the Insert menu. You're going to go to Image. You can add an image if you have them in your Google Photos, if you have a URL of an image. If you have a camera on your device, you can take a picture right now. You have to allow a picture, right? So I'm going to go , what the heck. No camera selected. Oh. It's because I haven't allowed it. So you're going to have to allow the camera to do that.

I'm going to go back to Insert, Image, and I'm just going to play it safe, because I can't remember what's in my photos. Nothing bad, I promise. When we used to travel, I used to take pictures in the hotel rooms that they sent us to. So I'm just going to stick with this one, OK? So add an image if you wish to your slide, OK? I resized mine a little bit so I can show you what I'm going to do next.

Now here's an image, right? It's an object, so that means it can have a line around it. It can have a border, OK? So I've selected the image. I'm going to go to the border weight. Right now it has no weight, OK? So I'm going to select 12. All right? Now it's got weight. The border has weight now, OK?

And I'm going to make the-- I'm going to select the object. You always have to select the object. And I'm going to make the color, instead of that-- it's a dark gray-- I'm going to make it white, OK? Which you can't really see, because it's on a white background. That wasn't smart, Melinda. All right. So I'll make it a little off gray. There we go. OK?

So now the image has a line-- kind of looks like a photograph in a way, right? And if you wanted to make it pop a little bit, you could also click on the image, go to Format Options, hit a drop shadow on it. Little more angle. Little more distance. Little less angle. There we go. Bada bing, bada boom. There's an image. Looks like a photograph, huh?

OK. That's one way to do it. That's one way to make sure-- how did I make the border white? I clicked on the image, OK? I went up to the Pencil, the Border Color tool, OK? And I just selected a color.

Now you're going to need a border weight. That's the next thing. You're going to want it to be big if you want this to look like a picture, OK? You might not want it to look like a picture. You might want it small. So you choose what's right for you. OK? And you also might want to play with it. Choose a different weight size. See what works for you.

Another way of making images look kind of cool is called masking. When you select an image-- not a shape-- when you select an image, you can crop it. You can mask it. We're using the Cropping tool, OK?

So I'm going to reset my image. Here we go. OK. Here's my image. How do you choose the weight? You click on Border Weight and you choose one of the numbers. OK? So I don't know how else-- I don't know how else to answer that question.

[laugh]

You select-- the next to the Pencil tool, there's Border Weight. And then you select one of the numbers. Eight pixels, four pixels, 12 pixels like that. All right. So click on your image. We're going to go back to masking.

The arrow next to the Cropping tool-- we don't want to crop the image right now. We want to mask it. So go to the arrow next to Mask, OK? It looks like it's giving me all these shapes. Why is it giving me these shapes? Because this is what the mask is going to do. Your image is going to appear in the shape.

OK. So show you a real simple one. Circle. OK? So my image is now masked. If you double-click on your image after you make the mask, you're going to see how the image-- masking is putting your-- it's putting a frame around your image that makes it look different. So think of-- I'm trying to think of an analogy. Think of a Tupperware lid.

[laugh]

OK? A solid color Tupperware lid, OK? And cut a hole in the middle of it. All right? Now put that lid with the hole in it, put it on a picture, OK? You can only see what the Tupperware lid allows you to see, right? That's the mask. OK? The Masking tool, you have to select the image, go to the arrow next to the Mask or to the Cropping tool. It's underneath Accessibility, the word Accessibility on mine. So there's the arrow right there.

It looks like it's giving me shapes, and it is. But these are the masks that I'm allowed. And I can choose any one of these, OK? Some of them are going to look really weird, like this frame right here. OK? That's kind of self-defeating.

[laugh]

OK? But I could mask it using a frame. I could mask an image using-- here we go. That's another weird one, the little donut hole, all right? Normally, you want to mask using something-- here we go. A little heart, OK? So you don't want to use the images that have holes in them already, OK? My co-workers will love that one.

[laugh]

All right? So Masking tool, it's taking away part of the image or it's-- well, that's exactly what it's doing. It's taking away part of the image, depending on the shape that you select, OK?

Wow, folks. We've done a lot of stuff, OK? We've actually gone through all the way up to-- we've inserted images. We inserted through the web. By the way, be aware of copyright. I did not say this. Google will search for images that are not copyright-free, but allowed for use in non-commercial. But it's incumbent upon you to make sure that that is true, OK?

Now on this slide, Insert Shapes, I didn't go over this. We inserted shapes, but this right here, if you're looking, do you see this pen? I drew this. I drew this. Now why do I draw my own images? Because if I want something-- and if you're looking at the zoom, if I want the point of the pen to appear, instead of green, I want it to appear blue, it's my image. I can do whatever I want.

If I want the pen itself-- which, by the way, is four or five parts, right? Here's the tip of it. There's a triangle. There's-- it's called a rounded square. Here's a rectangle. And up at the top, it's another rounded square. One, two, three, four, five shapes, and I've got a pen.

Really simple. Think out of the box. You can do a lot of stuff. And here's the same pen with a green shadow on it. So here's the pen. Here are all the shapes, and there's the pen. Here are the shapes before. Here are the shapes after. OK?

How do you remove a text box but leave the text? OK, you have a border around your text is what I'm hearing. So all you have to do is take away-- hang on.

[groaning]

I know we're running out of time. OK. So here we go. So here's your text box, and you probably have a border around it. Take the border away, OK? So click on your text box. Go up to the Pencil. Make it white. If your slide is white, no one will see it. OK? If your slide is blue, make it blue. Or better yet, make it transparent.

You add shadow to a drawing by clicking on your object and hitting Format Options. So remember, you have to select an object before you will see Format Options. I selected a text box. That's an object. You select an object, and then you get to do Format Options. Always select the object, then Format Options. There. I said it about four times now. OK?

What is arranging objects? We kind of went over this a little bit. We will repeat this somewhat when you come back for next time, which will be probably next Tuesday, I hope. OK? So watch the calendar.

Format Options. There's a lot of stuff here that we haven't gone over yet. We will cover all of this, because images are really a cool part of slides, and you can make your own.

I wanted to show you this while you're still here. This is part of the handout. These are all of the shapes. So when you click on this Shape tool and go to Shapes, some of these images are pretty small, so I made them big so you could see what they are. OK? So here's the general shapes. Here's the flow chart diagram. You can't type in these so much. Some of them, anyway.

The arrows. Those are the different arrows options they give you. Different callouts. And here are the equations, OK? So if you want to look at them bigger, look at it in the handout. We will definitely be going over Polyline and different things.

By the end of this series, you will know how to preview share. You will know how to create image maps. And you will be able to link to anything your little heart desires.

You're also going to be able to make postcards, make brochures, badges, all kinds of different print-type objects using Slides. And I'll even show you how to create your own PNGs, P-N-G files or JPEGs by the end of the series, OK? So I'm hoping to get all of this done probably within three sessions. We've just done one. It might be four.

Yeah, one of these days-- it's on our to-do list to make, if there's a series available, that you'll be able to select one, two, and three and be signed up for all of them, but we don't have that functionality yet. So patience. Patience.

OK. Now you have the e-book. For those of you that are advanced, I'm sure you learned at least one new thing. Come on. Come on. You did. You know you did. And you have this Slides deck. You can go through it and check it out, all right?

Oh. PDF. I was going to show you, but we don't have time, so that'll be next time. All right, folks. Thank you all for coming. I hope to see in some future webinars.