Google Slides will now show you everyone’s cursor in real-time like Microsoft Loop

Many collaboration tools like Microsoft Loop have, since their inception, shown you the mouse cursor of your team members who are adding and editing a document with you in real-time. Now, Google Slides is catching up with the times. In a new Workspace Updates blog post today, the company announced just this, with a splash of color!

The image above pretty much speaks for itself. Every collaborator’s name appears next to their cursor, and is shown in a different color moving across your display despite the fact that the others are sitting at their desk across the world.

The idea here is that you want to see what and when someone is editing so that you don’t accidentally make changes to the same on-screen element as them right when they do. Showing their cursor is a great way to reduce confusion while there are multiple users working together on a large slideshow, and it looks fun too!

I can see how this could be distracting, so it’s good that you can toggle it on and off by visiting the ‘View’ menu and going to ‘Live pointers’ and then selecting ‘Show my pointer’ or ‘Show collaborator pointers’. It’s nice to see it being added to begin with, even though Google’s late to the party as usual.

I’m happy to report that this feature is coming to all Google Account users, both Workspace (all licenses) and personal. It began rolling out yesterday for Rapid Release domains, and will continue to do so over the next two weeks. If you have a Scheduled Release domain, you’ll have time to get your team ready and familiar with the new tool since the rollout for you begins on October 3, 2023 and continues over a two week span from that date. Here’s to hoping this also comes to Google Docs and Sheets, right?