The last 5%

We hear you: Sometimes Smart Slides are exactly what you need, and sometimes they only get you 95% of the way there. Starting today, you can make those final tweaks to Smart Slides by choosing to break the design ai and convert them into Classic Slides.

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Classic Slides give you unlimited flexibility to design your slides as you see fit with a more familiar authoring canvas. On Classic Slides, you have access to:

• Text: Use any font you’d like, or stick with the fonts in your theme. Multi-block text styling and widgets for displaying code and equations level-up traditional text editing.
• Color: Customize text, fill, and lines with any color you’d like, or choose a color in your theme.
• Smart components: Leverage powerful charts and tables in your Classic Slides.
• Positioning: Position elements wherever you’d like with the help of alignment guides. Use grouping and layering tools to get the perfect look.
• Shapes and media: Draw paths, add shapes, and dress up your assets with our library of device frames for images.

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So go ahead: add that last item, adjust your margins, and make those icons just slightly smaller. Convert to a Classic Slide when you really need it – or use a Classic Slide to start from scratch – and let Smart Slides handle the rest.

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Read more from our CEO about our decision to develop Classic Slides.

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We know how much time you invested in those decks – don't lose your old work. Import your existing slides into Beautiful.ai, and incorporate them into your new presentations.

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Our presentation importer prioritizes precision, maintaining every possible visual detail we can from your original slides. Your imported slides will be fully editable and inherit from your presentation's theme wherever possible, so even those old slides will blend in with your new look. Any .pptx file will work, so you can renovate Keynotes and Google Slides while you're at it.

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Learn more about importing your presentations.

✨ The Journey template

Sometimes our paths aren't linear. Ups, downs, highs, lows – a straight, flat timeline or list of bullet points doesn't communicate those nuances. We created a winding twist on the classic Timeline to give you more options for communicating the sequence of events over an abstract period. Journey has plenty of fun surprises in store:

• Customize your milestones - Choose to use icons, images, map pins, or dots to mark your Journey milestones
• Configure start and end markers - Give your Journey definitive start and end points with descriptors, or let it flow off the canvas
• Emphasize certain milestones - Override the automatic milestone color with another color from your theme
• Try a variation - Seamlessly switch between Timeline and Journey to see what communicates your content best

Add a Journey slide to your next presentation, and let us know what you think!

Mobile updates

Look at you, always on the go! We realized our mobile experience wasn't quite up to par for those of you who regularly look at content from your mobile devices. We've released a few updates that should make your mobile experience more useful and less buggy:

• Share across all your apps - Share a link to your presentation using your device's mobile sharing mechanisms
• Collaborate, right from your phone - Add collaborators to your presentation without having to fire up the desktop app
• Rotate away - We addressed some bugs with mobile playback that made it a pain to rotate between portrait and landscape

Table template improvements

We heard your feedback: Sometimes our table template could be frustrating to deal with. That's why we completely overhauled the table to turn it into a template you'll want to come back to over and over. Updates include:

• Better autofit, styling, and sizing. Autofit your rows or columns. Bulk select and edit multiple cells at once. Control your text size down to the pixel.
• Merge cells.
• Better copy/paste. A blank cell is not a zero. Now the table template understands that. Copy and paste from your source data with much higher accuracy and ease.
• Custom colors and decoration. Use visual cues in your tables by adding flags to your cells and customizing fill, icon, and text colors.
• Much faster performance. Now you can make Really Big Tables! We've made it a lot faster to input data into your tables and add columns and rows, which should make working with tables much more seamless, all around.

Try it for yourself by adding a table slide to your Beautiful.ai presentation!

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Beautiful.ai Referral Program

We're excited to announce our referral program! You can now refer friends for future credit on your Beautiful.ai subscription.

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Just navigate to your profile, click Referrals, choose how to share, and watch your credit stack up. Sharing with friends is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

/ Create stunning slides with less effort

• Inspiration gallery - Choose from hundreds of beautiful, pre-built slides to add to your presentation. Since these slides were created with our smart templates, you can easily customize them with your own content. Click "Add slide" > "Get Inspiration" to peruse the gallery.
• Refreshed themes - We've added 10 beautiful, new themes to choose from when creating a presentation. You can rely on any of these built-in themes to create a clean, professional presentation. To see all your options, create a new presentation now.
• Presentation templates - Start your presentation from one of more than 50 pre-built templates. Let these templates serve as a guide for your story, and tweak them as needed!
• Chart and accent colors - You can now define dedicated colors for charts and accents. These theme customizations increase legibility and add sophistication to your presentation. Edit your theme to define these colors.

/ Experience faster, more intuitive editing

• Performance improvements - We heard your feedback around laggy typing and jumbled text, so we decided to make a change. With a 50x improvement in performance in this update, your text woes are a thing of the past.
• Editor layout - We reorganized controls in the presentation editor to make the experience simpler and IA more intuitive. Slide-level controls, like Elements and Layout can be found on the left, presentation-level controls at the top of the screen, and collaboration features on the right sidebar.
• More intuitive controls - Copy and paste elements from slide to slide. Drag and drop your text anywhere on top of an image slide. Select whether to add a numbered or bulleted sublist. You'll discover all of these simplifications and more while editing your slides.

/ Scale your presentation library with ease

• List view - It's finally here! You can now choose to view your presentations as tiles or a list. Sort by presentation owner, created date, and more to manage your ever-growing library of content.
• Simple sharing - 1-2-done! Invite people to edit or view your presentation directly from the presentation dashboard or the presentation editor. Sharing en masse has never been easier.

/ Team updates

• Update your invoicing email - Send your invoices directly to finance@, receipts@ - whomever! - without having to add them as a member. Team owners can update this information from the billing pane.
• Choose how to handle presentation ownership - When removing a member, team owners can now choose to transfer the affected member's presentations to someone else on the team in order to retain important company collateral.
• Navigate to your team workspace faster - Your team workspace is now prioritized as your default workspace when logging in. To increase accessibility, team workspaces will also show up at the top of your workspace dropdown.

/ General

• Comments are now available to everyone! Now when you invite your client or colleague to collaborate on a presentation, they'll be able to see your feedback without needing to upgrade.

Finally, an effortless way to keep everybody on-brand and every slide up-to-date: the Beautiful.ai Team Plan is here!

Check out some of the ways we're making it easier to manage your team's presentations:

• Shared Slides: Design a slide once, and allow your team to use it infinitely. Push updates to all presentations in a single click. Learn more.
• Shared Theme: Lock in the right logo and brand elements for use across your team, staying visually consistent from pitch to pitch. Learn more.
• Team Administration: Manage user roles and permissions, centralize billing, and structure your team for simple sharing and collaboration.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial now!

Beautiful.ai Bot helps you collaborate on presentations by sending you realtime updates about your presentations directly in Slack! Just add the app to Slack to get started.

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When you add the app to Slack, we'll send you updates each time a collaborator makes any of these changes:

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• Adds a comment
• Edits a slide
• Adds a slide
• Moves a slide
• Removes a slide
• Renames the presentation
• Changes the presentation theme

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Go ahead and try it out! All you need to do is authorize the app, create a presentation, invite a team member to collaborate, and watch the magic happen as they edit the slides!

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Access your presentations from Google Drive

Now you can organize your Beautiful presentations right alongside all of your other content in Google Drive. This is just one of the many steps we're taking to make collaborating with your team even simpler. Read more about how to connect your Google Drive account here.

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Import media from Dropbox

We've made it easier than ever to grab the media you need for your slide directly from your Dropbox account. When adding an image to your slide, just choose Dropbox as the source, and voila! You can peruse your Dropbox folders and integrate that content directly into your Beautiful presentation - all without leaving the app. Read more here.

Our brand new thermometer Smart Slide has been released into the wild! Use it to track and report on progress toward a goal. Intuitive controls allow you to easily adjust the fill of the thermometer, customize the reporting units, and add informational callouts.

We're bringing you new ways to collaborate and stay up to date on presentations through our new comments and notifications features.

Using comments, you can have a dialogue about the content and storyline of your presentation without leaving the app. Comments allows you to leave messages on slides for your teammates (or yourself!). Learn more here.

You and your teammates will also be notified when a comment is added to a slide or when the slide is changed. Edit your notifications settings to customize how you're alerted - in-app or via email - to make sure you're up to date on all of your presentations. Learn more here.

Forget the days of recording and re-recording audio tracks and meticulously organizing all of your mp4 files to upload to your slides. We built an audio recorder directly into the app, so you can narrate your story faster and easier. Learn more here.

And while YouTube and Vimeo have some really great content, we know that you do, too. Now you can upload videos to your slides directly from your computer. Learn more here.

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Our new Elements feature allows you to venture outside the constraints of our Smart Slides to emphasize your points. Now, you can add shapes, text, images, icons, and lines to your slides with elements. Elements are built with the same design intelligence and automated components as our Smart Slides, so you continue to have the help of a designer as you leverage elements to customize your message.

Remember: With great power comes great responsibility. Use elements with discretion to keep your presentations clean, simple, and effective!

Read more about how to use elements here.