Presentations are a core part of BAU — whether it's to update your team members or get buy-in from executives. More than 50% of participants in a Decktopus survey said they create a presentation at least once a week.
The trouble? Most Google Slides are a snooze-fest. 79% of surveyed people from Presentation Panda’s study say most presentations are boring.
The formula is simple — dry numbers + bulleted text + monotonous visuals = suppressed yawns from your audience.
Of course, presentations are rarely just about engaging your stakeholders or having fun. But imagine the impact you could make if your Google Slide presentation was useful and interesting.
Enter: Google Slide add-ons. There are a plethora of add-ons in the G-suite world to turn your sleepy slides into stunning stories. I dug into the nooks and crannies of the internet and found you the eight best ones.
The 8 best Google Slide add-ons and extensions
1. Best for embedding up-to-date data in your presentations — Plus
2. Best for adding splendid images to your slides — Unsplash
3. Best for imbibing interactive elements in your presentation — Pear Deck
4. Best for creating charts in your Google Slides — Lucidchart
5. Best for inserting icons in your presentations — Icons for Slides & Docs
6. Best for customizing brand fonts in your slides — Extensis Fonts
7. Best for making your slides’ font accessible — Slides Translator, Easy Accents, and Grackle Slides
8. Best for creating a rough first draft of your presentation — MagicSlides
How to use Google Slide add-ons?
If you don’t know how to use Google Slide add-ons, here’s a quick tutorial:
Step 1: Click on “Extensions” in the navigation bar.
Step 2: Hover over “add-ons” and select “Get add-ons” to open the Google Workspace Marketplace.
Step 3: Search your desired Google Slide add-on, give Google account permissions, and your add-on is installed.
Let’s get into the list of the best Google slide add-ons now!
Best for embedding up-to-date data in your presentations
1: Plus
Think of Plus as a self-updating screenshot tool. Let’s say you make a sales report with the same template every week. Instead of manually replacing the graphs on your Google Slides every time, you could use Plus to update the data in a single click.
No more copying the same screenshots over and over again. Plus can take live snapshots of any website and keep it up-to-date in just one click.
Price: Free.
Best for adding splendid images to your slides
2: Unsplash
No one likes a presentation that’s all text — no visuals aren’t an option anymore. Unsplash gives you the best stock-free images to spice up your slides.
Simply install the add-on and use the sidebar to search for relevant images using keywords — without ever leaving the tab.
The best part about Unsplash? It has a wide array of options to choose from, and it’s completely free of cost. If they aren’t exactly to your liking, use add-ons like Image Filters to edit the images you get via Unsplash.
Price: Free.
If you’re looking for alternatives, I love Images, Gifs and more — it contains not only images, but icons, GIFs, stickers, emojis, and illustrations too. The only con is it’s a paid add-on. But it costs only $2.95/year — which is worth the price if your job requires making many presentations.
Free icons, photos & illustrations is also an amazing add-on, but I found its icons and illustrations far superior to its images (compared to Unsplash).
Best for imbibing interactive elements in your presentation
3: Pear Deck
Teachers and administrators primarily use Pear Deck to share questionnaires with their students. But don’t forget even your audience members (whether they’re teammates or executives) expect you to interact with them.
Pear Deck can come in handy to keep your stakeholders involved. Use it to ask multiple-choice questions, embed external websites, or even add an audio file for your slides.
Price: Free plan available with limited options. Paid plans start at $149.99/year.
If Pear Deck’s branding is too education-oriented for your business and seems unaligned, try alternatives like Slido, Fillable Slide, or Live Poll Maker.
Best for creating charts in your Google Slides
4: Lucidchart
Want to create helpful charts, flow diagrams, mind maps, and even wireframes in your presentations? Look no further: Lucidchart lets you make them all on Google Slides with its add-on, no external exporting required.
It’s perfect for teams creating engaging presentations frequently and wanting to represent data and information visually. Lucidchart has several collaboration options, including commenting, in-editor, and version history.
Price: Free for three documents (includes 60 shapes). Paid plans begin at $7.95/month for individual users and $9/user for teams.
There are frequent issues with Lucidchart, though: The add-on didn’t show for me for five consecutive days in Google Slides. For other G-suite products like Google Docs, Lucidchart continually showed the error, “Something went wrong when executing the add-on.” Many users reported the same issues last year.
I looked for alternatives and found AddPicto excellent — mask images into unique shapes, choose from their infographic icons, and express information with an extra oomph factor.
There’s a 90-day free trial for AddPicto. After that, the plan is $40/year. If you’re looking for free options, diagrams.net allows embedding diagrams stored in your Google Drive to Google Slides. Draw Diagrams is also free and lets you create charts natively, but it’s limited in options compared to AddPicto.
A closer UI competitor would be Creately — but it’s better suited for creating brainstorming sessions and textual plans rather than flowchart diagrams requiring various shapes.
Best for inserting icons in your presentations
5: Icons for Slides & Docs
Icons are essential to convey information visually and make your presentation pop. Google Slide add-ons have plenty of free add-ons to add icons, including Insert Icons for Slides, Icons by Noun Project, and Icon Scout. All icon add-ons have a search feature where you can type your keyword (like “clock”) and get access to every icon that meets that query in their library.
But I found the best one to be Icons for Slides & Docs by Flaticon.
There are plenty of options in color, grayscale, and gradient. Not just this: You can even choose options for the kind of shapes you want — hand-drawn, lineal color, filled, or outlined.
I love the variety here and found it better than most of the other free icon add-ons in the market.
Price: Free.
Best for customizing brand fonts in your slides
6: Extensis Fonts
Extensis Fonts has over 1400 fonts you can sort in multiple ways — alphabetically, by popularity, by trending, and by date.
You can even increase or decrease the size of the font previews on the right sidebar and apply your chosen font to slide text with a single click.
If you want to customize your presentation by using brand fonts that aren’t yet available in Google Slides natively, this add-on will come in handy.
The only con I found is you can’t directly type and search for your desired fonts by name. Translation: You have to scroll through their thousands of fonts to find the one you already have in mind.
Price: Free.
Best for making your slides’ font accessible
7: Slides Translator, Easy Accents, and Grackle Slides
Whether you’re trying to build a great remote-first culture or an inclusive in-office environment, it’s crucial your presentations are accessible to employees and stakeholders from different backgrounds.
I found three Google Slide add-ons to make your presentation accessible across the board:
Slides Translator lets you translate text into various languages in one click, free of cost. Another translator with paid features even allows voice typing for over 60 language dialects and can read aloud text in various languages.
Easy Accents enables adding accent marks to your Google Slide presentation so you never misspell another language by sticking only to the traditional keyboard. It’s free of charge, with paid features available — like setting a default language and premium marks.
Grackle Slides ensures your presentation is digitally accessible and guides you through mistakes, if any. It checks for things like whether your tables are readable by screen readers and whether all your images include an alt-text for people who are visually impaired.
Best for creating a rough first draft of your presentation
8: MagicSlides
There are many AI-related Google Slide add-ons in the market (no surprises there), and most of them serve the same use case: Helping you create a rough outline of your presentation to build off from.
MagicSlides is my favorite. Enter your topic, the number of slides you want, any reference text if you wish — and voila! The app generates a rough presentation with images. It isn’t polished and needs quite a bit of editing to be presentable — but it’ll help you bid goodbye to writer’s block.
What’s more: You can customize the colors and fonts. And the “Summarize” feature lets you add reference text that the tool will use in its slide deck. GPT for Slides is identical, but I found MagicSlides to be superior in terms of content, images, and speed.
Key Points is a similar add-on, but you have to add a PDF or DOCX file for the AI tool to read and summarize. And if you’re going through the effort of doing that, you’re better off with SlidesAI.io because it’s better in terms of UI and generates better slides.
SlidesAI.io also has a “Magic Write” feature to help you paraphrase sentences and use AI-suggested images based on the contents of your slide.
All of these AI tools are free of cost with paid features. For example, both SlidesAI.io and MagicSlides have only three free presentations per month. If you want more, MagicSlide offers 50 presentations/month at $12/month, and SlidesAI.io gives 10 presentations monthly at $10/month.
Creating an impeccable Google Slide presentation
Google Slide add-ons are a life-saver to spruce up sleepy decks to compelling & impactful stories without a lot of heavy lifting. Remember that you’ll probably need to play around a bit with all of these add-ons to see the various ways you can employ them for your particular use case.
The good thing is most of these Google Slide add-ons and extensions are free — and even the paid features are light on the pocket.
