Slide Deck

A finished diagram shows everything at once, which is exactly what you want for reference and exactly what you don't want when you are narrating it. Slide Deck turns the diagram into a talk: a set of slides you build yourself, each showing the elements you chose, presented full screen one at a time.

Choose it from the mode picker at the top of the floating palette, in the Present band beside Laser, Spotlight and Avatar. Like them it needs something to work with, so it is disabled on an empty canvas.

Picking the tool does not start presenting. It opens the Slide Deck panel, where you build and check the deck; starting is a deliberate second act.

What a slide is

A slide is a set of elements you chose, from one tab. It is not a region of the canvas, not a saved camera position, and not a layer.

• The deck spans tabs, a slide doesn't. Slide 1 can come from one tab, slide 2 from another, and slide 3 from the first one again, but each slide draws from a single tab, which is what gives it a backdrop and a coordinate space to be framed in.
• An element can be on as many slides as you like. Membership is a list, not a split, so a title that belongs on every slide simply goes on every slide.
• Slide order is the deck's own. It has nothing to do with tab order or with which element sits in front of which, and reordering the deck never restacks anything on the canvas.
• Slides point at elements, they never copy them. Restyle a shape and every slide it appears on shows the new one. Delete it and the slides quietly skip it; undo the delete and it is back on all of them.

Building a deck, in short

Arrows come along on their own. An arrow with both ends on the slide is included automatically, so you can build a slide by dragging a box round four shapes without hand-picking the connectors between them.

Everything else about building, the slide menu, editing what is on a slide, hiding one from the run, reordering, notes and time budgets, is in Building a Deck.

Presenting it

Press Present at the bottom of the panel and the deck opens full screen at slide 1 with every part of the editor hidden. See Presenting for how a slide is framed, how you move through the deck, and what you can and cannot touch while it runs, and The Presenter's Controls for the strip in the corner, the pacing clock and the settings behind the cog.

Starting a presentation broadcasts nothing. Nobody else is pulled into your deck and nobody's view moves. The way you show a deck to people is the way you already show them everything else in the meeting: share your screen.

The deck itself is ordinary diagram data, though: a teammate who opens the diagram sees your slides in their own Slide Deck panel, and can edit them. It saves and travels exactly like the diagram's name does.

Presenting is available to everyone, including people on a view-only share link, since narrating a diagram somebody sent you is a perfectly ordinary thing to want to do.