Real-time collaboration comes to Slides

Decks are rarely built by one person. Somebody owns the narrative, somebody else owns the numbers, and the last hour before a review is usually both of them in the same file at once. Slides now shows who else is in the deck, where their cursor is, and which slide they are editing — so the two of you stop working on the same thing by accident.

What live collaboration in Slides shows

• Presence: the people currently in this deck, per file rather than per workspace.
• Live cursors on the slide, so you can see where somebody's attention is before you move the thing they are pointing at.
• An "editing now" marker against a slide, which appears on any change and clears a few seconds after they stop.
• Edits applied as they happen, with no save step between making a change and the other person seeing it.

Why the editing marker matters more than cursors

A cursor tells you where somebody is looking. The marker tells you where somebody is changing something, which is the information you need before restructuring a slide. It is deliberately short-lived: it lights up on an edit and goes out a few seconds later, so it reflects activity rather than an idle tab left open since the morning. The common collaboration failure in decks is not lost text, it is two people reworking the same slide in different directions and merging the results badly afterwards.

Agree the split before the last hour. Narrative, numbers and design are the natural seams, and a deck divided that way lets three people work at once without anybody waiting.

Working on a deck together

1. Check presence before reordering or deleting slides — that is the change that disorients everybody else.
2. Claim sections rather than slides, so nobody is blocked waiting for one page.
3. Put the figures in a sheet and reference them, instead of retyping numbers into shapes twice.
4. Use speaker notes for the argument you will make out loud, which also tells your collaborators what the slide is for.
5. Do a final pass alone. Collaboration is for building the deck, not for the last read-through.

Ettex Slides ships presence, live cursors and the editing marker per deck, and present mode is what the result is delivered with. Where several people routinely build the same deck from the same figures, keeping the numbers in a sheet and the narrative in the deck saves the duplicate-data problem entirely.