Video transcript
6-minute video ·
Today, I’m going to be showing you a quick tutorial on how to import Google Slides into Figma automatically using the Pitchdeck Figma plugin.
To get started, all we need to do is go to our Figma file, click on the little resources icon, and search for “Pitchdeck.” Under the “Plugins” tab, click on the Pitchdeck item. You can run the Figma plugin by either clicking on the “Run” button or, as I recommend, clicking on the “Save” icon to save it to your Figma plugins list.
I’ve already clicked on the save icon, so I’m just going to go to my canvas, right-click anywhere, go down to “Plugins,” then go down to “Saved plugins,” and click on the Pitchdeck item. That will run the Figma plugin we saved a second ago. Once the Figma plugin loads up, you’ll get this empty state of the Figma plugin because we don’t have any slides in our current Figma file, which is fine. Normally, you would probably go ahead and start adding some slides or designing your own frames. Today, however, we’re going to import slides we’ve already designed from Google Slides.
You can see here I have a few different slide decks in my Google Slides account. We’re going to import each of these into Figma automatically using the Figma plugin. The way to do that is by giving it a .pptx file from Google Slides. You can import a .pptx file directly into Figma from your computer. To do that from Google Slides, go to your Google Slides file, go to the “File” tab at the top, then go down to the “Download” menu, and click on the Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) link. Click on that, and it will automatically download your Google Slides as a .pptx file.
Now that I have that downloaded on my computer, I’m going to go to my desktop, find the “recipe book.pptx” file that we saved from Google Slides, and drag and drop it into the dropzone over here. I’m going to grab the .pptx file from my computer and drop it directly into the dropzone area here in Figma. It will read the file and start importing the slides into Figma.
As you can see, it’s imported all eight slides. If we go to our canvas and zoom in a little, you’ll notice it’s imported each of those slides from our Google Slides file. You can see that these have been imported into individual layers as well. If we zoom in, you’ll notice this is an image layer that we can move around. The same goes for the text layer—this is editable text. You can edit that content in Figma, move it around, or add extra content to it.
This process has taken all of our content from Google Slides, exported it to a PowerPoint file, and imported it into Figma. That’s how it works. You’ll notice that it’s mostly looking really good, although there are a few small quirks. For example, when it comes to text layers with mixed lists, things might look a little wonky. This feature is still in beta, as you can see from the “BETA” label in the import PPTX dropzone, but most of these issues will get ironed out over time.
Now, let’s import another deck. We’ve got this “yearbook” Google Slides template that we can import. I’ve already saved that one to my desktop, so again, I’m going to drag and drop the .pptx file into the dropzone. It will load the file and import that one as well. You’ll see the slides are importing, and we get a little progress indicator. Once that finishes, it automatically switches to a brand new page in our Figma file.
Each time we import a .pptx file from Google Slides, we get a new page in our Figma file. You can see that this one has been imported as well. Again, all of these layers are editable. The text layers are editable, so we can change the content as needed, move the layers around, and adjust things as expected. The images are all individual image layers, and that’s looking great. This process saves a lot of time. Instead of manually recreating a file from Google Slides, we’re able to import it directly into the Figma plugin.
Let’s do one more to show you a larger deck. We have this deck here with a couple of dozen slides. I’m just going to click on the “Import .pptx” button—you can also browse your computer, but I’ll drag and drop since I already have the desktop window open. I’m going to drag and drop this last .pptx file from Google Slides, and import that one as well. You’ll see it importing those 21 slides into Figma. Depending on how big your deck is, how many images and layers it has, that will determine how long it takes to import, but overall, it should only take about 30 seconds for most files.
There we go—it’s imported our 21 slides into Figma. Again, all of these are editable. You can edit the text, move the layers around, and everything is now editable Figma layers. This is still in beta, so there may be a few things that aren’t 100% right. However, it’s a great head start, allowing you to get all that content and those layers in there. If you need to make any small tweaks, this process will still be much faster than manually recreating every single layer from scratch from your Google Slides in Figma.
This method gives you a lot more flexibility. If you want to re-export this into a PowerPoint file for PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides, you can do that by clicking on the “Export” button, changing the export format to PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides. That will give you a .pptx file from Figma that you can reuse in another application as well.
That’s basically it! I just wanted to show you how to import your Google Slides into Figma as individual editable layers automatically. You can now experiment with the “Import .pptx” feature, which is still in beta but improving over time. If you’re interested in importing your slides from Google Slides automatically and still need to use that software with your team but prefer editing the content in Figma, this process will hopefully improve your workflow speed by automating part of it.
Thank you, as always, for watching, and we’ll be back soon with more Figma tutorials like this one.
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