Decks

A deck is a slide presentation with Napkin's hands. Every slide is a framed patch of the same infinite canvas — you draw on it, drop images and reference cards onto it, and sketch on it with your team in real time, exactly like a sketch board. The frame is what makes it a slide: a stage that presents, exports, and shares as a page. Decks are 16:9 unless you choose otherwise (see Slide size).

Decks live in their own tab beside Sketches. New deck creates one and drops you on the canvas.

Slides and the filmstrip

The filmstrip on the left is the deck's order. The canvas is free space — slides can sit anywhere — but the filmstrip decides what comes after what.

• Add — New slide adds one to the right of your last slide, using the layout you last picked. The chevron beside it opens the layout choices.
• Jump — click a slide's thumbnail and the camera flies to it.
• Reorder — drag thumbnails up and down. Canvas positions don't move; only the presentation order does.
• Rename — the pencil on a thumbnail, or Enter with it focused; a slide that already has a name can also be renamed by double-clicking it. The name shows in the filmstrip and in the presented footer.
• Delete — the × on a thumbnail removes the slide and everything on it, as one undo — ⌘Z brings it all back.
• Hide — the eye on a thumbnail keeps a slide in the deck but out of the show. It dims in the filmstrip, and present mode, presenter view and every export step past it. An appendix, or a cut that might come back.

A slide selects by its border or its title label, and moving it carries its contents along. What's on a slide is simply whatever sits within its frame.

Slide size

View → Slide size makes every slide widescreen (16:9), 16:10, standard (4:3), or portrait (9:16). Changing it scales what's on each slide to fit the new stage and centres it; new slides and layouts follow the deck's size from then on. The PDF and PowerPoint exports take their page size from the deck.

Layouts

Layouts are pre-placed text blocks: Title slide, Title + body, Two columns, Big statement, or Blank. Their prompts ("Add a title") are ghosts — visible while you edit, invisible to your audience, in exports, and to guests. Fill them in or ignore them.

To add a layout to a slide that already exists, select the slide and use the layout chip in the pill above it. It only adds what's missing — a slide that already has a title just gets the body.

Text on slides

A new slide's layout drops title and body text boxes at sizes that project well, and titles pick up your workspace brand color automatically. Add more text with the text tool and size it from the pill.

Selected text gets a formatting cluster in the pill above it:

• Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough — for the whole block, or for the words you select while editing.
• Size, in points, with a typeface picker and where the text sits in its box (left, centre, right; top, middle, bottom).
• Bullets and numbered lists — turn each line into an item. While editing, Enter continues the list (with the next number), Enter on an empty item ends it, and Tab / ⇧Tab nest and un-nest a line. Numbers keep themselves in order as you add and remove lines.
• Links — ⌘K on selected words gives them a web address. Linked words draw underlined and open in a new tab when clicked in present mode.
• Shrink text to fit — in the text panel. Off, a block whose words run past its bottom shows a small amber mark at the corner while it's selected, so you can see it needs a bigger box or less text. On, the text shrinks until it fits.

Alignment guides do the layout work: drag a text block and it snaps to the slide's edges, its centerlines, and other content — including equal-spacing hints when three things fall into a rhythm. Resizing snaps the same way.

Arranging shapes

Select two or more shapes and the pill's Arrange chip lines up their edges or centres (⌥A, ⌥D, ⌥W, ⌥S, ⌥H, ⌥V), and with three or more evens out the gaps between them (⌥⇧H, ⌥⇧V). A single shape aligns to its slide — the quickest way to centre a title.

• Group (⌘G) — a click on any member takes the whole group; drag one and they all come. ⌘-click reaches inside a group for one shape, and double-clicking a selected group drills into the shape under the pointer. ⌘⇧G ungroups.
• Lock (⌘⇧L) — a locked shape can't be selected, moved or erased from the canvas; select-all leaves it alone. It still moves with its slide. Right-click it to unlock, or right-click empty canvas for Unlock everything.
• Outline — one chip in the pill for a shape's outline: solid, dashed, dotted, long dash or dash-dot, its weight, or no outline at all. The chip draws the line it makes.
• Order — ] and [ bring to front or send to back; ⌘] and ⌘[ move one step at a time.
• Opacity — a slider in the pill fades any shape.
• Link a shape — ⌘K with a shape selected gives it a web address, or a slide in this deck to jump to. In present mode the cursor changes over it and a click follows it, so a deck can branch: an agenda slide whose items jump to their sections, a "back to the agenda" button on each.

Images

Double-click an image (or press Crop in the pill) and its handles trim the picture instead of stretching it: the whole image shows faintly behind so you can bring parts back, and Reset crop restores it. Images take a corner radius and an opacity like any shape.

Slide backgrounds

Select a slide and the pill offers a background swatch — white, soft tones, or a dark stage. Select several slides to retint them together. The background follows the slide everywhere: canvas, present mode, exports, and thumbnails.

Speaker notes

Notes in the deck's top bar opens a column bound to the slide you're looking at — write what you'll say, in markdown. Notes travel with the deck, but your audience never sees them: not in present mode, not in exports, not on share links. They surface in presenter view, and zv1 reads them with the deck's outline.

Present

Present offers three ways in: Fullscreen takes the whole screen; In this window runs the show inside the browser window (a Fullscreen button in the footer takes it the rest of the way); With presenter view opens the notes window beside a windowed show, for putting the slides on one screen and your notes on the other. Either way it's one slide at a time, in filmstrip order, with a progress bar in your workspace color. Arrow keys, space, or a click advance; Escape leaves. The deck stays live while presented — a teammate's edits appear as they happen.

Presented and exported slides carry quiet furniture: the slide number bottom-right, and your workspace mark bottom-left when the workspace has one. You can't select or move it by accident.

Press L (or Laser in the footer) while presenting and your pointer over the slide shows to everyone watching as a small red dot — a laser pointer that reaches people on a present-only link too.

Presenter view — its own window with this slide's notes, the next slide, a talk timer, and prev/next controls — opens from the Present menu or from the presented footer. Put the presentation on the big screen and the presenter window on yours; advancing either moves both. Opening it doesn't end the show; the show just steps out of fullscreen until you press Fullscreen again. The presenter window is live: notes you add and changes a teammate makes show up there as they happen.

Share a deck

Share links work exactly like sketch sharing, with one deck-only addition: a present-only link opens straight into the slideshow — no canvas, no tools, just the slides, live. That's the link to send when the deck is the message. A view link gives guests the canvas plus their own Present button; a draw link puts them on the canvas with you.

Export

From the File menu, Export deck:

Hidden slides are left out of every deck export. The PNG export scopes still work too — Current view and Selection are handy for lifting a single diagram.

Import

Import on the Decks page takes a PowerPoint file or a PDF.

A .pptx arrives as real text and shapes — with its bold phrases, colours, sizes, lists, links, cropped pictures and speaker notes — and can be edited, re-themed and presented like anything else on the canvas. What didn't map is reported rather than approximated.

A .pdf arrives as one slide per page, with the page sitting centered on the slide as its background. A 16:9 PDF fills each slide edge-to-edge; from there it's a normal Napkin deck: annotate over the pages, reorder, present, share. Long documents import their first 30 pages.

Comments on a spot

The Comment tool on the rail (N) pins a note to a spot on a slide: click where you mean and write. Open threads show as numbered pins on the canvas, and clicking one opens the deck's comments on that thread. In the comments panel, the Slide 3 chip on a pinned thread flies you back to the spot. Pins are for people working on the deck — present mode, exports and share links never show them.

zv1 can read your deck

Ask zv1 about a deck and it can read the whole thing as an outline — slide titles, text, and what's drawn where — or look at any slide exactly as present mode shows it. "What's slide 3 missing?" is a fair question.