Google Slides finally gets Multi-Monitor Support to smooth out your presentations

Presentations can be quite stressful. In the middle of it all, you are usually juggling your slides, speaker notes, timing, and trying to engage the audience all at once. To help out a bit, Google just made it a whole lot easier to pull off presentations a bit more gracefully with a new feature rolling out to Slides: multi-monitor support.

This is a big deal, and if you’re someone who regularly presents, this will be a very welcome change. Now, instead of cramming everything onto one screen, you can have your Slides displayed on the main projector or monitor while keeping your speaker notes, timer, and other controls conveniently visible on your laptop screen. Why this hasn’t been a thing before now is almost baffling.

How it works

First up, this is incredibly simple to use. When you’re ready to present, you’ll see a new option in the Slideshow dropdown menu labeled Presentation display options. Here, you can choose to enable Presenter View and select which monitor you want to use for your slides. Once you start the presentation, your main content will be on the external display, and you’ll have a separate, private view with all your tools on your laptop.

This change has the potential to significantly improve your presentation experience when using Slides. It gives you more control, allowing you to focus on your delivery and connect with the audience without worrying about losing track of your notes or where you are in the presentation. It also helps you present more confidently, knowing you have all the information you need right at your fingertips.

Google is rolling this out gradually, starting September 16th for Rapid Release domains and September 30th for Scheduled Release domains. It should be available to everyone within 15 days of those dates, regardless of whether you’re a Google Workspace customer, a Workspace Individual subscriber, or just using a personal Google account.

So, the next time you have a presentation, remember to give multi-monitor support a try – you might just be surprised how much easier it makes things and how much more flexible you can be when you go to show off that slide deck you spent so long crafting.