Presenting on the go and charts made easy in the Google Slides and Sheets Android apps

As previously announced, you can use the Google Slides app on your mobile phone to present to any screen using Chromecast, AirPlay, or Google Hangouts (Android only). This launch makes that task even easier for presenters, allowing them to change and preview slides from their phone’s lock screen and to toggle between a presentation and video in a Hangout.

When presenting, it’s important to keep your audience’s attention. Typing and retyping your mobile phone’s password to unlock your screen and advance your presentation can be time-consuming and distracting. With this launch, when you use the Slides Android app to present to a Chromecast device or Hangout, a notification will remain on your phone’s screen, even when it’s locked. Clicking on that notification will give you options to move forward or backward through your slides or to exit your presentation entirely.

Because sometimes you want to see your audience, this launch also makes it possible to switch to video when presenting to Hangouts via the Slides Android app. It’s easy—simply tap the video camera icon at the top of your screen to view and pin other Hangout participants.

In addition to the above enhancements to the Slides Android app, this latest release also includes improvements to the Google Sheets Android app. Charts in Sheets allow you to display data in ways that are often easier to understand and more compelling. You can already create a multitude of charts in Sheets on the web; with this launch, you can insert charts and change their type using the Sheets Android app as well. For instance, if you insert a bar chart from Explore, you can now quickly and easily change it to a column chart directly within the app.