Slide Deck

A finished diagram shows everything at once, which is exactly what you want for reference and exactly what you don't want when you are narrating it. Slide Deck turns the diagram into a talk: a set of slides you build yourself, each showing the elements you chose, presented full screen one at a time.

Choose it from the mode picker at the top of the floating palette, in the Present band beside Laser, Spotlight and Avatar. Like them it needs something to work with, so it is disabled on an empty canvas.

Picking the tool does not start presenting. It opens the Slide Deck panel, where you build and check the deck; starting is a deliberate second act.

What a slide is

A slide is a set of elements you chose, from one tab. It is not a region of the canvas, not a saved camera position, and not a layer.

• The deck spans tabs, a slide doesn't. Slide 1 can come from one tab, slide 2 from another, and slide 3 from the first one again — but each slide draws from a single tab, which is what gives it a backdrop and a coordinate space to be framed in.
• An element can be on as many slides as you like. Membership is a list, not a split, so a title that belongs on every slide simply goes on every slide.
• Slide order is the deck's own. It has nothing to do with tab order or with which element sits in front of which, and reordering the deck never restacks anything on the canvas.
• Slides point at elements, they never copy them. Restyle a shape and every slide it appears on shows the new one. Delete it and the slides quietly skip it; undo the delete and it is back on all of them.

Building a deck

Arrows come along on their own. An arrow with both ends on the slide is included automatically, so you can build a slide by dragging a box round four shapes without hand-picking the connectors between them.

Each row shows the slide's position, its name, which tab it draws from, and how many elements are on it, plus a marker when it has notes or is hidden. A row does one thing: press it to open that slide. The editor switches to that slide's tab and selects its elements, which is how you check a slide without presenting it. Everything you can do to a slide lives in its … menu instead, so a panel the width of the palette never has to carry five controls per row.

The slide menu

Press the … at the right of a row and you get the same shape of menu the Explorer's rows and the tab context menu use: a row of quick actions across the top, then two labelled categories you can open.

The quick actions are Rename, notes (Add notes, or Edit notes once there are some, lit when the slide has a script waiting), Duplicate — a copy with the same elements, straight after it, for a "same picture, different point" pair — and Delete, pinned to the right on its own.

Deleting asks first. A confirmation opens beside the menu button, because the elements survive a deletion but the arrangement does not, and the arrangement is what you spent the time on. Either way the elements stay exactly where they are on the canvas.

Selection: what is on the slide

A slide's membership is editable for the life of the deck, not just at the moment you made it. Open the menu's Selection category and it tells you what the two buttons will act on and how many elements the slide holds now:

• Add puts the elements you have selected onto the slide.
• Remove takes them off again. Only the slide changes; nothing leaves the canvas.

Both are offered only while you are on that slide's own tab, and the category says so when you are not. A slide holds one tab's elements, so adding from a different tab isn't something to refuse politely; it is something that cannot be expressed.

Visibility: hiding a slide from the run

The menu's Visibility category carries a single switch: Hide the slide, or Show it again.

Hiding is a different idea from deleting. It is for the slide you might want next week, the backup detail for a question you may not get, the section you cut for time — the slide stays in the deck, it just doesn't run. A hidden slide shows in the panel with its name struck through and an eye marker beside it, so you can always see it is there.

Hidden slides are skipped everywhere at once: the count on the Present button, the 7 / 23 in the presenter's display, and what advancing lands on all leave them out, so nothing can disagree about how long the deck is.

Ordering the deck

Drag a row up or down the list to move it. The list does not reshuffle while you drag: a caret shows where the row will land, and the move happens when you let go — a list that reorders live moves the very row you were aiming at. It works on touch as well as with a mouse.

Presenter notes

Open a slide's … menu and press Add notes, and a notes box opens under the list: what you mean to say over this slide. Press Done to put it away again — it is behind the menu rather than always on screen so the panel never grows a text area you did not ask for.

Notes belong to the slide, not to anything on it, which matters because the same box on two slides usually wants two different sentences said about it. They are plain text — it is a script you read off, not something anybody needs to bold — and during the presentation they stay hidden until you ask for them.

Presenting

Press Present at the bottom of the panel and the deck opens full screen at slide 1, with every part of the editor hidden. The button carries a badge with the number of slides that will run, so you know the length of the deck before you start it — hidden slides are not counted. Slides whose tab hasn't been opened yet are loaded first, so the deck never stalls halfway through.

• One slide at a time. Only that slide's elements are drawn; advancing replaces the picture rather than adding to it.
• The backdrop is the slide's tab's — its background colour, pattern and theme.
• The framing fits the slide's elements, with a little padding. If a slide contains exactly one frame, the frame's bounds are used instead, which is how you author precise framing without learning anything new.
• The first slide arrives as a card over the darkened editor. Then the whole screen travels, backdrop and all: the slide you are leaving goes out to the left while the next one comes in from the right, mirrored when you go back, so the motion always says which way through the deck you are going. If your device is set to reduce motion, you get a cross-fade instead.

Moving through the deck

There are previous and next buttons in the display at the top right too, because a presenter at a projector often has a mouse and no keyboard within reach, and "click anywhere to advance" neither announces itself nor goes backwards.

Past the last slide you get an end card; one more advance closes the deck. Leaving puts you back on the tab, the view and the panels you started from — worth having, since the last slide usually left the camera zoomed right in on one box.

Read anything, change nothing

Nothing on a slide can be altered. There is no editing, moving or deleting, and none of the session verbs either: no voting, no starting or stopping a timer, no ticking a Done check, no firing a reaction pad. You are on a projector in front of a room, and a stray click that edits the diagram is not a feature.

Live data still reports itself: a timer somebody started before you began presenting goes on counting down on the slide, and a poll shows the results it has.

Click an element and a read-only popover opens with what that element has to say — its note, its comment thread, and any assigned action with its assignee and status. There is no composer: you can show the room the objection somebody left on a box, and you cannot answer it from here.

Because click-to-advance and click-to-inspect are the same gesture, the target decides: a click on empty space advances the slide, a click on an element opens its popover, and a click outside an open popover just dismisses it rather than skipping ahead.

The presenter's controls

Top-right sits a small strip of controls carrying, in order:

• the position (7 / 23) and the slide's name,
• previous and next buttons,
• a notes button,
• a settings cog,
• and a close button.

It fades away when the pointer sits still and comes back the moment you move it, so a still screen is clean for the room while every control stays one twitch of the mouse away. It stays put while a popover is open, so nothing is ever left stranded over the slide.

The notes button opens your presenter notes in a popover under it, sized so the slide stays readable behind. It carries a dot whenever the current slide has notes, so you can tell there is a script waiting without opening anything. Press it again, press Esc, or advance the slide to close it.

Presenter settings

The cog opens nine settings in three groups. They are meant to be decisions you can make in one glance and undo in one more, because this popover opens on a projector in front of a room.

Transition

• Slide (the default, the whole screen travelling), Fade (one slide dissolving into the next), or None (a straight cut).
• A speed — Quick, Normal or Slow — which disappears when the transition is None rather than sitting there greyed out.

Playback

• Auto-advance — Off, or every 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. It pauses while a popover is open, so something you are reading is never swept away by a timer you had forgotten about.
• Click to advance — turn it off if you gesture at the screen with the mouse and would rather drive from the keys and buttons alone.
• Loop the deck — after the last slide, start again instead of ending. With auto-advance, that is the whole "leave it running on the wall" setup.

Display

• Fill screen (a small slide is blown up) or Actual size (never past 100%), for authors whose slides are already the size they meant.
• Show position — turn the counter and slide name off for a clean screen.
• Keep controls visible — stop the strip fading when the pointer rests.
• Hide the pointer — a still cursor left on a projector is a distraction. It goes and comes back with the controls, so a hidden pointer is never a trap.

Presenting is yours alone

Starting a presentation broadcasts nothing. Nobody else is pulled into your deck, nobody's view moves, and collaborators with the diagram open carry on seeing the diagram. The way you show a deck to people is the way you already show them everything else in the meeting: share your screen.

Remote cursors and lasers are hidden from your own view while you present, so nothing punctures the slide on a projector. Edits arriving from other people apply underneath as usual, and a slide re-renders if one of its elements changed.

The deck itself is ordinary diagram data, though: a teammate who opens the diagram sees your slides in their own Slide Deck panel, and can edit them. It saves and travels exactly like the diagram's name does.

Presenting is available to everyone, including people on a view-only share link — narrating a diagram somebody sent you is a perfectly ordinary thing to want to do.