Google Slides presentations are primarily intended to be displayed on horizontal landscape displays. But what if you want to create a presentation for mobile phones or maybe a big vertical screen?

If you project a typical slideshow on your phone's screen in portrait mode, you'll notice big black bars on the top and bottom of the slides. This way, Google Slides never uses all of your phone's screen. Creating a vertical slideshow optimizes the screen size and produces phone-friendly presentations that are viewable in portrait mode.

How to Make a Vertical Slides in Google Slides

Changing your slides from horizontal to vertical is a matter of dimensions. Fortunately, Google Slides allows you to fully customize the slideshow dimensions to your preference. To create vertical or portrait slides, all you need to do is to ensure that the height exceeds the width.

Page setup in Google Slides

When creating a presentation for mobile devices, it's important to consider that the majority of new phones have screens with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels. With these in mind, let's make a vertical presentation in Google Slides.

  1. Create a new presentation in Google Slides.
  2. Go to the File menu.
  3. Click on Page setup.
  4. Click on Widescreen 16:9 and then select Custom. Two text boxes and a drop-down menu will appear.
  5. Change inches to the unit you'd like. We're going to use pixels.
  6. In the first text box from the left, enter the width of your page. That'll be 1080 in our case.
  7. In the second text box, enter the height of your page. That'll be 1920 in this example.
  8. Click on Apply.

Now your slides are all vertical. If you modify the page setup in an existing presentation, the presentation will change to the vertical form. However, the elements in the slide may be displaced, so you'll need to do some clean-up on that behalf.

All the themes in Google Slides are compatible with vertical resolutions as well. If the default themes aren't up to your standards, you can download Google Slides themes from other sources.

From Landscape to Portrait in Google Slides

While most presentations are designed for horizontal screens, vertical slides can take advantage of the full size of vertical screens like mobile phones or outdoor displays.

The default setting in Google Slides is horizontal, but you can always switch to portrait orientation. Google Slides lets you change the size of the slides to anything you like, and now you know how to do that.