Automate Google Slides with IFTTT and let your decks build themselves

Nobody opens Google Slides for fun. You open it because a report is due, a team update needs a home, or someone asked "can you just throw together a quick deck" like that's a five-minute favor. It never is. You're hunting down images, retyping the same stats you already have somewhere else, and building the same slide structure you built last week and the week before that.

IFTTT fixes the part nobody enjoys. Instead of opening a blank presentation and starting from nothing, you can have new slides appear, get filled in, and even get announced to your team automatically, all before you've finished your coffee.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro and let your decks build themselves while you focus on what actually goes in them.

Here's how to make Google Slides work for you instead of the other way around.

Turn your content into slides before you've even finished writing it

You already have more raw material than you know what to do with. Blog posts, articles, whatever's coming through your feeds. Turning that into something visual usually means screenshotting, cropping, and pasting until your afternoon disappears.

Skip that entirely. Every time a new post lands in an RSS Feed you're tracking, this Applet uses Gemini to generate a custom image from the post's title and content, then drops it onto a brand new slide in your presentation.

And if your content ideas live in a spreadsheet instead of a feed, that works too. The moment you add a new row to Google Sheets, whether it's a form response, a pitch idea, or a report entry, this Applet spins up a brand new Google Slides presentation named after that row's data. Your backlog becomes a stack of ready-to-fill decks without you opening a single blank file.

Push team updates into the deck the moment they happen

Weekly stats, sprint recaps, KPI dashboards. Somebody on your team has to gather all of it and manually rebuild the same slide every single week, and that somebody is probably you. It's the kind of task that eats an hour of your Friday for no good reason.

If your reporting tool can send a webhook, it can send a slide instead. This Applet listens for that web request, whether it's a weekly stats push, a standup summary, or any automated data drop, and adds a new slide to your presentation with that content already formatted as text.

Once that slide exists, your team should probably know about it. This second Applet runs on the same kind of webhook trigger, asks Google Slides for the presentation's title and slide count, and posts that summary straight to your Slack channel. Your team sees the update land in the deck without anyone having to announce it themselves.

Preview a deck without ever opening the file

Sometimes you don't need the whole presentation open, you just need to know what's in it. Maybe you're dropping a link in a group chat and want to give people a preview before they click through. Maybe you're trying to remember what slide four actually says.

Jot down a note with your presentation's ID in the Note widget, and this Applet asks Google Slides for the title, slide count, and link, then posts a rich preview straight to your Discord channel. Your collaborators get a snapshot of the deck without you having to explain it in a message.

Want more detail than that? This second Applet takes the same kind of note and instead posts the full ordered list of slides, including slide numbers, links, and any speaker notes, right into Discord. Your team can see how the deck is laid out without ever opening it themselves.

Keep a permanent record of every deck

Decks get updated, replaced, and sometimes deleted, and the version people actually needed is never the one still sitting in your Drive. A little automatic archiving fixes that before it becomes a problem.

If you walk into the same office, client site, or meeting room regularly, this Applet triggers the moment you arrive: it asks Google Slides for the current deck, exports it as a PDF, and saves that copy straight to Google Drive. By the time you sit down, the latest version is sitting in your Drive folder.

Prefer a paper trail over a single snapshot? This second Applet runs on a monthly schedule instead, pulling each slide's number, speaker notes, and link from your presentation and logging them as rows in Google Sheets. Over time you get a running spreadsheet history of a deck's content, useful for team reviews or just knowing what changed since last quarter.

Turn your social activity into a running highlight reel

If you post across platforms, there's no single place that shows what you've been putting out lately, at least not without opening four different apps. A deck can be that place, and it can fill itself in.

Every time a new tweet matches a search you set up on X, this Applet appends a slide to your presentation with the tweet's text, a link back to it, and a timestamp. Track your own mentions, a campaign hashtag, or a keyword you're watching, and the deck keeps growing on its own.

Publishing a video too? This second Applet fires every time you upload a new public video to YouTube, creating a new slide and dropping that video's thumbnail right onto it. Pair the two and you've got a single presentation that tracks your posts and uploads across platforms in the background, ready to pull up whenever someone asks what you've been working on.

More ways to connect your Google tools

Google Slides rarely works alone. Most of what ends up in a deck started somewhere else in your Google stack, so it's worth connecting the rest of it too.

The deck that builds itself

You didn't get into your job to manually rebuild the same presentation every week. Set up a couple of these Applets once, and Google Slides turns into a tool that does the assembly for you, so all that's left is the part you actually wanted to spend your time on: what goes in the slides, not how they got there.

Start a free trial of IFTTT Pro and start building.