Build a Deck

In this guide, you'll build a short three-slide deck from scratch. Along the way, you'll pick a theme, use a layout, add text and a shape, and present the deck full-screen.

1. Create a New Presentation

From your workspace, click New → New Presentation. You'll get a deck with one slide — an empty canvas, using the Blank layout — and a thumbnail strip on the left.

2. Pick a Theme

A theme controls the colors, fonts, and background used across every slide. Wafflebase ships with several built-in themes.

Click the palette button in the toolbar (tooltip: Theme) to open the Theme panel on the right, then click any theme to apply it to the whole deck. You can switch themes any time — your content stays put.

See Themes & Layouts for the full set of built-in themes and how to customize one.

3. Add a Title

The first slide starts blank, so give it a layout: right-click an empty part of the canvas, choose Change layout…, and pick Title slide. The slide now has a title and a subtitle placeholder.

Double-click the title placeholder and type a deck title — for example, Q2 Roadmap. Double-click the subtitle placeholder and add a short tagline.

The placeholders inherit the heading and body fonts from the active theme, so you don't need to format text manually.

4. Add a Content Slide

Insert a new slide after the current one. The three routes differ in which layout the new slide gets:

How	Layout of the new slide
Press ⌘+M / Ctrl+M	Same layout as the slide you're on
Click Add slide in the toolbar	Blank
Right-click the thumbnail strip → New slide	Blank

To choose the layout as you insert, click the chevron next to Add slide — its tooltip reads Choose a layout — and pick Title and body. That adds a new slide with that layout; it does not re-lay-out the slide you're on. (For that, see Choosing a Layout.)

Type a title — Themes — and add a few bullet points in the body placeholder:

• Theme picker in the right sidebar
• One-click reskin of the whole deck
• Built-in light and dark themes

5. Add a Shape

Slides ship with an OOXML-aligned shape library. From the toolbar, click Shape and pick a rectangle. Drag on the canvas to draw it.

With the shape selected, the Fill color in the toolbar shows the active theme palette at the top — so you can apply the theme's accent color without picking a hex value.

6. Present

When you're ready to present:

• Press ⌘+Enter / Ctrl+Enter to start from the current slide, or
• Press ⌘+Shift+Enter / Ctrl+Shift+Enter to start from the first slide.

In presentation mode:

• → / Page Down / click — advance to the next slide
• ← / Page Up — go back
• Esc — exit

Format Options

Most per-object settings that aren't on the toolbar live in the Format options panel. Open it with the sliders button at the right end of the toolbar (tooltip: Format options). With nothing selected it shows Slide size — Widescreen 16:9, Standard 4:3, or Widescreen 16:10.

Slide width is fixed and its box is disabled; only the Height changes, which is what changes the aspect ratio. To go to a size that isn't one of the three presets, type a height — the preset dropdown then reads Custom on its own. Picking Custom from the dropdown does nothing.

Select something and the panel shows the sections that apply to it:

Section	Appears for	What's in it
Size & Position	Everything	Width, Height, X position, Y position, Rotation, a Lock aspect ratio toggle, two 90° rotate buttons, and a deck-wide Units choice of Inches or Centimeters
Text fitting	Text boxes	Do not autofit / Shrink text on overflow / Resize shape to fit text
Recolor	Images	No recolor / Grayscale / Sepia
Adjustments	Images	Transparency, Brightness, Contrast
Drop shadow	Shapes, images, text boxes	Color, Transparency, Angle, Distance, Blur
Reflection	Shapes, images, text boxes	Transparency, Distance, Size
Alt text	Shapes, images, text boxes, tables	A description for screen readers

Connectors and groups get Size & Position only, and tables get Size & Position and Alt text. Width, Height, and Rotation are hidden for connectors, and a text box set to Resize shape to fit text has its Height locked, since it's computed from the content.

Rulers, Guides, and Snapping

Rulers run along the top and left of the canvas. They're always on — there's no show/hide command — and they use inches or centimetres based on your locale, independently of the Units choice in the Format options panel.

To place a guide, press on a ruler and drag onto the slide; release inside the slide to drop it, or outside to cancel. Drag an existing guide to move it, or drag it back onto a ruler to delete it. Right-clicking on or near a guide offers Delete guide, Delete all vertical guides / Delete all horizontal guides, and Delete all guides.

Guides belong to the whole presentation, not to one slide.

Snapping is always on as you drag: elements snap to the slide centre, to your guides, and to other elements' edges. Smart guides — the arrows and dashed outlines showing equal spacing or matching sizes — are always on too; neither has a setting. Hold Shift while resizing to preserve the aspect ratio (which also turns off equal-size snapping, since the two would fight), and Shift while dragging to lock movement to one axis.

Copy Formatting Between Objects

The brush button in the toolbar (tooltip: Format painter) copies fill and stroke from one object to another:

1. Select a single shape, text box, or connector.
2. Click Format painter.
3. Click the object you want to paint.

It applies once and switches itself off — there is no double-click-to-stay-on mode, and no keyboard shortcut. Click the button again, or press Esc, to cancel without painting. Selecting nothing (or more than one object) makes the button do nothing, and images can't be used as a source.

Shapes and text boxes share a fill and stroke, so you can paint either way between them — a shape's formatting onto a text box, or the reverse. (Painting onto text keeps only a solid colour: a gradient fill collapses to one of its colours.) Connectors are the exception: they carry a stroke only, so a connector can be painted onto another connector and nothing else, and nothing else can be painted onto a connector.

Crop an Image

Select an image and click the crop button in the toolbar (tooltip: Crop), or just double-click the image. The picture dims outside the crop window, and eight black handles appear on the window itself:

• Drag a handle to trim.
• Drag inside the window to slide the picture under it.
• Press Enter, click the toolbar button again (now Done cropping), or click anywhere outside the crop window to apply.
• Press Esc to cancel.

Reset crop, next to the crop button, restores the full picture in one undo step; it's greyed out until the image has actually been cropped.

Cropping is a free rectangle only — there are no aspect-ratio presets and no crop-to-shape. Images inside a group can't be cropped; ungroup first.

Speaker Notes

Every slide has a speaker-notes box below the canvas, showing the placeholder Speaker notes… when it's empty. Click into it and type — notes are saved with the slide, and switching slides switches the notes with them.

The pane is always visible; there is no show/hide toggle. Drag the thin divider directly above it to make it taller or shorter (the size is remembered per browser). It can be shrunk but not collapsed away entirely.

Two limits worth knowing:

• Notes are plain text. There is no bold, italic, or bullet formatting in the notes box.
• They are not shown while presenting. There is no presenter view or second-screen notes display — presentation mode shows the slide only. Notes are written into a .pptx export as real PowerPoint notes, so a deck you export keeps them; a PDF export does not include them.

Notes are last-write-wins if two people type in them at once — see Editing at the Same Time below.

Editing at the Same Time

Two people in the same text lose one set of edits

Text in a deck is not merged character by character the way it is in the document editor. Speaker notes, text boxes, shape text, and table cells each commit their whole contents when you click away, so the last person to click away overwrites what the other typed — silently, with no conflict prompt.

Presence cursors show you where others are working; use them to keep out of each other's text, or take turns.

Structural edits converge without losing work: adding, deleting, duplicating, and reordering slides; adding, deleting, and restacking elements; table row and column changes; and theme and guide changes. Moving or restyling elements settles per field on the last change committed, so two people dragging different elements are fine — it's two people in the same text box, or the same notes, that costs somebody their edits.

Arrange, Align, and Order

With one or more elements selected, the Arrange button in the toolbar (the stacked-layers icon) collects the positioning commands:

Menu entry	What it does
Group / Ungroup	Bind the selection into one object, or break it apart. Group needs 2+ elements selected; Ungroup needs a single selected group.
Order → Bring to front / Bring forward / Send backward / Send to back	Move the selection up and down the stacking order.
Align → Left / Center / Right / Top / Middle / Bottom	With several elements selected, aligns them to each other. With just one selected, aligns it to the slide.
Distribute → Horizontally / Vertically	Even out the gaps. Needs 3 or more elements — the outermost two stay put and the ones between them move.
Rotate 90° clockwise / Rotate 90° counter-clockwise	Each selected element turns about its own center.

Each command counts as a single undo step, and every element keeps whatever rotation it already had.

The Arrange button only appears while something is selected — with an empty selection the toolbar shows its idle tools instead.

Add a Table

Click the Insert table button in the toolbar and drag across the grid picker to choose the number of rows and columns, then click to drop the table on the slide.

• Double-click a cell to edit its text; the text-formatting toolbar appears while you type.
• Tab / Shift+Tab move between cells — pressing Tab in the last cell adds a new row.
• Right-click a cell for structure changes: Insert row above/below, Insert column left/right, Delete row/column, and Merge cells / Unmerge cells.

Connect Shapes

Use connectors to link shapes — handy for flowcharts and diagrams. Click the Line dropdown in the toolbar and pick a tool:

• Line and Arrow — straight connectors.
• Elbow connector — right-angled routing.
• Curved connector — a smooth curve.
• Scribble — freehand drawing, not a connector.

Drag from the start point to the end point. As you approach a shape, connection points appear and the endpoint snaps to it, so the connector stays attached when you later move the shape. To change the routing of a selected connector, right-click it and choose Straight, Elbow, or Curved.

Animations & Transitions

Click the sparkles button in the toolbar (tooltip: Motion) to open the Motion panel on the right.

Slide transitions (how one slide gives way to the next):

1. In the Transition section, pick a type — Fade, Dissolve, Slide, Flip, Cube, Wipe, or Push.
2. Choose a speed (Slow / Medium / Fast).
3. Click Apply to all slides to use the same transition everywhere.

Object animations (how an element enters, exits, or is emphasized):

1. Select an element on the slide.
2. In the Animation section, click + Add animation.
3. Pick a Category (Entrance, Exit, or Emphasis) and an Effect, then set when it runs with Start — On Click, With Previous, or After Previous. Fine-tune Duration, Delay, and Easing as needed.

Click the ▶ Play button to preview the animations right in the editor. They also run when you present the deck.

Charts in an Imported Deck

Exporting to PowerPoint drops imported charts

If you import a .pptx that contains charts, they appear on the slides and they render in a PDF export — but a PowerPoint (.pptx) export omits them, with no warning. The rest of the deck exports normally; the chart is simply absent from the exported file.

In a deck, charts can only arrive by importing a PowerPoint file — the slides toolbar has no insert-chart tool, and an imported chart cannot be edited. You can move and resize it, but its numbers, series, and type are fixed at whatever PowerPoint last saved. (Spreadsheets do have an Insert chart button; see Charts & Pivot Tables.)

If you need a round-trip through .pptx on a deck with charts, keep the original file, or rebuild the chart as a picture before exporting.

See Import & Export for the full format support table.

What's Next

• Themes & Layouts — Catalog of themes, layouts, and placeholders
• Keyboard Shortcuts — Full shortcut reference
• Collaboration & Sharing — Invite others to co-edit the deck