Tong Family

Well, it is good to push products and one area that I’ve been confused about is what are the limitations for Google Slides for the iPhone and on the Web. It is remarkably good at collaboration and “good enough” layout, but if you want to really get work done on an iPad only can you?

Net, net, it is possible, but there are some limitations:

1. Themes editing only online. The biggest one is that on the iPad or iPhone application you cannot do theme editing. That is you are limited to the build-in themes or themes that you have made on the real Web version. Practically what this means is that you can edit your themes but only by requesting the “Desktop Site” on Safari.
2. Although you can request a desktop site, you can’t actually run the browser offline because iOS underneath the covers uses Webkit/Safari for everything, so offline storage is not supported even with the Google browser on iOS.

The second limitation is that you can’t use more than the fonts from Google Fonts (https:/google.com/fonts). While Keynote on both IOS and the Mac can run with the native fonts installed on your machine, with GSuite, you cannot do this in fact:

1. Google Slides. This has native support for all the fonts, you go to Fonts/Add New.
2. Google Docs. You need an Add-on called Extensis Fonts to get the same capability.

So the net is that if you want the really whizzy fonts, you need to stick with the packages like PowerPoint or Keynote to get it to work on iOS or Mac. So that’s the choice, good collaboration or better font handling.