How-To

How to Change Slide Sizes in Google Slides

By Adam Davidson

Updated October 10, 2023

Google Slides are the ideal size for presentations but not so great for printing. Learn how to change slide sizes in Google Slides in this guide.

Google Slides is a free web-based app that allows you to create and display slides for presentations. The slides are intended to be shown on a computer or screen, and the default sizes of the slides reflect this; they match the most common sizes of computer screens and other displays.

If you want to print your slides, however, then these pre-defined slide sizes are far from ideal. They don’t match up well with the standard sizes of paper that are used in printers, meaning that your printed slides can end up looking like a mess.

The good news is that it’s quick and easy to change the size of the slides in your document to be anything you want. We’ll explain how to change slide sizes in Google Slides below.

How to Change All Slide Sizes in Google Slides

It’s simple to change the size of all of the slides in your Google Slides presentation at once. You can do this through the Page Setup options.

1. Open your Google Slides presentation.
2. Click the File menu.
   
3. Near the bottom of the menu, select Page Setup.
   
4. Click the page size drop-down.
   
5. Select from one of the options.
   
6. Standard gives your slides a 4:3 ratio, meaning they are a little wider than they are tall.
   
7. Widescreen 16:9 is a standard widescreen size, which is the ratio used in most televisions.
   
8. Widescreen 16:10 is similar to 16:9, but the slides are a little taller for the same width.
   
9. Custom allows you to choose your own dimensions. The first value is for the width and the second for the height.
   
10. You can choose to use units of inches, centimeters, points, or pixels.
    
11. If you’re printing to US Letter paper, set the width to 11 inches and the height to 8.5 inches. You’ll need these values the other way around if your slides are portrait rather than landscape.
    
12. If you’re printing to UK A4 paper, set the width to 29.7 centimeters and the height to 21 centimeters.
    
13. When you’re happy with your dimensions, click Apply.
14. The size of all of your slides will be changed.

How to Change a Single Slide Size in Google Slides

The settings that you use in Page Setup will be applied to all the slides in your document. There’s no way to edit the size of a single slide and leave the others as they are.

If you only want to change the size of a single slide, you’ll need to make a new Google Slides document containing that slide and change the size of the slide in your new document. You can then print this slide at the appropriate size.

The slide in your original presentation will remain the same size as all the others.

To change a single slide size in Google Slides:

1. Open your Google Slides presentation and select the slide that you want to change the size of.
2. Right-click on the slide thumbnail to the left of your main window.
   
3. Select Copy.
   
4. To quickly create a new Google Slides presentation, open a new browser tab and type new into the address bar.
   
5. Press Enter and a new Google Slides document will open.
6. Right-click anywhere in the main window and select Paste.
   
7. Select Keep Original Styles to maintain the style of your slide.
   
8. Right-click on any blank slides and select Delete.
   
9. You now have a new presentation containing just your single slide. You can use the steps in the section above to change the size of this slide to whatever you wish.

Become a Google Slides Pro

Learning how to change slide sizes in Google Slides allows you to print off your presentation, so you have a hard copy to work with. The standard slide sizes are great for presentations but they aren’t necessarily good for printing.

There are plenty of other tips and tricks you can learn to improve your Google Slides skills. If you’re changing your slide sizes in order to print off your presentation, then you may want to know how to print Google Slides with notes. You can learn how to hide a slide in Google Slides if you don’t want it to show in your current presentation. You can also add transitions and animations to Google Slides.