Use Shift Enter in Doc to Slides Add-On

The Doc to Slides Add-on allows you to take your text from a Google Doc and put it into Google Slides. Each paragraph becomes its own slide.

Template

alicekeeler.com/doctoslides

Join my beta testers to permanently include the Add-on to your Add-on menu.

Enter Makes a New Paragraph

What creates a paragraph in the Google text document is the enter key. If you press enter twice to create a space after the paragraph then you create a blank paragraph. This will cause a blank slide to be created when you use the Doc to Slides Add-on.

Line Spacing

Instead of pressing enter twice to create a space between paragraphs, use the document formatting instead. Under the Format menu choose “Line spacing” and then “Add space after paragraph.” You may want to first use Control A to select all the text you currently have and then while the entire document is selected, choose to “add space after paragraph.”

Shift Enter

But what if you do not want each line to be it’s own slide? This is where Shift Enter comes into play. Shift Enter does not create a new paragraph. If you want to make a list (not bullets) hold down the Shift key and then press the Enter key to create a new line but not a new paragraph.

Doc to Slides Add-on

Using the Add-on menu choose “Doc to Slides” and “Send to Slides.”

Authorize the Add-on

You will need to authorize the Add-on. It may give you a scary warning and a “Back to safety” button. Instead, click on “Advanced” and then scroll down and choose “Go to Docs to Slides (unsafe).” Google is letting you know they have not reviewed my code. You can use the Tools menu and choose “Script editor” if you want to review the code yourself to see I did not code anything malicious.

Manually Edit

The Doc to Slides Add-on is intended to help you make your slides faster. It can be slow to copy and paste each sentence onto separate slides. Notice that the Shift Enter resulted in ApplesBananasPears instead of
Apples
Bananas
Pears

as you might have expected. Shift Enter got them all onto the same slide, but not formatted the way you thought. You will need to edit the slides. Place your cursor where you want a new line and use Shift Enter in Google Slides also. This is a handy trick in slides to avoid making new paragraphs on the slide also.

Link to Slides created by Doc to Slides.

Format the Layout

Doc to Slides does not copy the formatting. Notice my italicized bold text is no longer bold or italicized in the Slides. The default layout is “Section header.” You can click on “Layout” in the toolbar to change to a different layout if that works better.

However, if you want to make global changes to all of the slides you will want to edit the Slide master. Go to the View menu and choose “Master.” On the Section header layout, change the font size, font, and font color. This will universally apply to all the slides with that layout.