How to Make Google Slides Portrait

Google Slides is a useful free alternative to PowerPoint and has many handy features when creating presentations. Have you created a presentation and now need to change its orientation? Here's how to make Google Slides portrait rather than landscape so you'll always have exactly the presentation you need. It's simple when you know how.

You can only change the orientation from your web browser. You can't do this on the iOS or Android apps.

How to Change Slide Orientation in Google Slides to Portrait

It only takes a few moments to change the slide orientation on your Google Slides presentation, but you need to know how. Unlike Microsoft PowerPoint, it's not the most intuitive of methods as there's no automatic switch to landscape or portrait. Here's what you need to do to change things around.

This changes the orientation for all slides in the presentation. There's no method for doing it for individual slides.

Go to https://docs.google.com/
Click on the hamburger icon.
Click Slides.
Click on the presentation you want to edit.
Click File.
Click Page Setup.

You may need to scroll down to see this option.
Click the drop-down box currently displaying Widescreen 16:9

This may be a different size, depending on how your presentation is set up.
Click Custom.
Swap the two numbers listed around to rotate the slide into a vertical position.

Want to change the size in a different way? Enter a figure here. We recommend 7.5 x 10 inches if you want to create a portrait image that looks good when printed.
Click Apply.
The slide has now been correctly moved to the Portrait perspective.

How to Change Slide Orientation to Landscape

Is your presentation set up for Portrait mode and you're now regretting everything? Don't worry. It's just as simple to change your slides back to Landscape perspective. Here's what to do.

Go to https://docs.google.com/
Click on the hamburger icon.
Click Slides.
Click on the presentation you want to edit.
Click File.
Click Page Setup.

You may need to scroll down to see this option.
Click Custom.
Swap the two numbers listed around to rotate the slide into a vertical position.

Want to change the size in a different way? Enter a figure here. We recommend 10 x 7.5 inches if you want to create a landscape image that looks good when printed.
Click Apply.
The slide has now been correctly moved to the Landscape perspective.

When to Use Different Perspectives on Your Presentation

You may be wondering why you need to switch between Portrait and Landscape perspective with your Google Slides presentations. We've looked at a few key reasons why it can be worthwhile doing.

Newsletters. If you're creating a newsletter in Google Slides, a portrait view is often far better for reading than landscape. It looks better for everyone and is far easier to hold too if you're printing it out.
Different posters. Depending on what you're designing, different posters can look better either in Portrait or Landscape perspective. It's useful to be able to see which looks better for your design.
Infographics. Similarly, if you're designing an infographic for your presentation, graphs will look better in Landscape while more text heavy results will look better in Portrait.