Distributing a Google Slides Template to an Entire Google Workspace Organization
It can be hard to get everyone at your company to use your custom Google Slides template. Pointing employees to homebrew wiki pages and asking them to duplicate an existing presentation to start working on their own is a lot to ask.
Instead, you can save your Google Slides template to your company’s G Suite account, available for anyone on your domain to use.
First, head over to slides.google.com while logged into your work Google account. You’ll notice some templates at the top of the page offered by Google and below them your recently viewed and edited presentations.
Click on Template gallery, visible in the top right, to reveal your organization’s saved templates. If none exist yet, you’ll see* the following screen inviting you to submit a template.
After clicking the Submit template button, you’ll see the following dialog where you Select a presentation to use in your organization's template gallery.
Once you select a presentation from your Google Drive, you can choose to submit a copy instead. In reality, it doesn’t make a ton of difference as you’ll be able to edit the master later if it is your original or a new copy. The benefit of creating a copy here is if you want to rename your template before submitting. There are also category options. I find them to be pretty awful, but maybe they work for your org?
*Note: You may need your friendly, neighborhood IT staff to give your user account permissions to submit templates via the Google Admin Console. If this is the case, you won’t see the option to submit a template.
Great! So now your whole organization has access to your submitted template. However, the discoverability is pretty low still, with templates living on the Google Slides homepage only.
One way to provide greater access to your company’s new Google Slides template is to take the URL to your master template, replace edit with copy, and share that link instead.
Or, you can use this URL https://docs.google.com/presentation/u/0/?ftv=1&tgif=d to get to the Template Gallery directly.
When I worked at Square, we used an internal wiki as well as go/links, a centralized URL shortener that works within a company’s network only. This is a great way to have a link that anyone in your domain can click or visit to create a new presentation from your template.
Other helpful details for distributing a Google Slides template:
- You need to be using an account within a G Suite organization
- You have to have edit access to the presentation before submitting
- The file can’t have restricted sharing options, e.g., it can’t be a private file
- Don’t have a custom Google Slides template yet? Check out the templates over on presentation.design
presentation.design is a resource hub by Zacht Studios, The Presentation Design Agency.
Need help creating that presentation template or pitch deck for your company? Zacht Studios is a team of skilled creatives focused on company storytelling and fundraising.
We’ve crafted pitch decks, marketing materials, and unforgettable stories for some of your favorite companies like Adobe, Square, Etsy, and SpaceX. Plus, we’ve supported startups in raising more than $1.41B to date.
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