Extend Google Slides

  • Google Apps Script allows you to programmatically create and modify Google Slides presentations using the Slides service.

  • You can customize Google Slides by adding custom menus, dialog boxes, and sidebars with Apps Script.

  • Apps Script lets you integrate Slides with other Google services like Calendar, Drive, and Gmail.

  • You can publish your Apps Script projects as add-ons for Google Slides to share them with others.

Google Apps Script lets you programmatically create and modify Slides presentations using the Slides service. Use Apps Script to add custom menus, dialogs, and sidebars to Slides. You can also integrate Slides with other Google services like Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Gmail.

The Slides service is the recommended way of working with Slides in Apps Script. Also enable the Slides advanced service if you need to invoke the Google Slides API directly.

Get started

Apps Script includes a built-in service that lets you programmatically create, read, and edit Slides. Apps Script can interact with Slides in two ways:

  1. Any script can create a new presentation or access an existing presentation if the user has the appropriate access permissions for that presentation.
  2. A script can be bound to a presentation, which provides the script more direct access to the Slides user interface for that script. To create a bound script, select Extensions > Apps Script from within Slides.

Custom menus and user interfaces

Customize Slides by adding custom menus, dialog boxes, and sidebars. To learn the basics of creating menus, see the guide to menus. To learn about customizing the content of a dialog, see the guide to HTML service.

If you're planning to publish your custom interface as part of an Google Workspace add-on, follow the style guide for consistency with the style and layout of the Slides editor.

Google Workspace add-ons for Slides

Google Workspace add-ons are specially packaged Apps Script projects that run inside Slides and can be installed from the Google Slides add-ons store. If you've developed a script for Slides and want to share it with the world, Apps Script lets you publish your script as an add-on so other users can install it from the add-on store.

See the sample translate add-on or sample progress bar add-on for examples of Slides add-ons.