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Google Slides

Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation application developed by Google, part of the Google Workspace productivity suite. It enables individuals and teams to create, edit, and collaborate on presentations in real time from any device. The Google Slides API provides programmatic read and write access to presentation content and structure, allowing applications to retrieve slide content, create new presentations, apply batch updates to modify slides, manage text, images, shapes, and speaker notes — all without manual interaction. Common use cases include ingesting presentation data into analytics pipelines, automating the generation of data-driven slide decks from operational systems, extracting slide content for content management, and syncing presentation metadata with downstream reporting tools.

Google Slides icon

Power end-to-end data operations for your Google Slides API with Nexla. Our bi-directional Google Slides connector is purpose-built for Google Slides, making it simple to ingest data, sync it across systems, and deliver it anywhere — all with no coding required. Nexla turns API-sourced data into ready-to-use, reusable data products and makes it easy to send data to Google Slides or any other destination. With comprehensive monitoring, lineage tracking, and access controls, Nexla keeps your Google Slides workflows fast, secure, and fully governed.

Features

Type: API

SourceDestination

  • Seamless API Integration: Connect to any endpoint as source or destination without coding, with automatic data product creation
  • Visual Composition & Chaining: Build complex integrations using visual templates, chain API calls, and compose workflows with data validation and filtering
  • API Proxy: Expose curated slices of your data securely with a secure and customizable API proxy that validates and transforms data on the fly
  • Request optimization with intelligent batching, retry, and caching to minimize API calls and costs

Prerequisites​

The Google Slides API connector authenticates using OAuth 2.0 through Nexla's managed Google integration, so you do not need to create a Google Cloud project or register your own OAuth client. To authorize a credential, sign in with a Google account that has access to the presentations you want to work with — Nexla requests read-only access to Google Slides presentations and to Google Drive, which allows Nexla to read presentation content and locate presentation files stored in Drive. For more information about the underlying API, see the Google OAuth 2.0 documentation.

Authenticate​

Create a credential in Nexla​

  1. After selecting the data source/destination type, click the Add Credential tile to open the Add New Credential overlay.

  2. Enter a name for the credential in the Credential Name field and a short, meaningful description in the Credential Description field.

  3. Click the Authorize button (or equivalent OAuth flow trigger in the Nexla UI). You will be redirected to Google's sign-in and consent screen.

  4. Sign in with the Google account whose presentation data Nexla should access, and review the requested permissions.

  5. Click Allow to grant Nexla access. You will be redirected back to Nexla, and the credential will be marked as authorized.

    The authorized Google account determines which presentations are accessible through this credential. Nexla can only access presentations that the authorized account has permission to view or edit. If you need to access presentations owned by multiple Google accounts, create a separate credential for each account.

  6. Click the Save button at the bottom of the overlay. The newly added credential will now appear in a tile on the Authenticate screen during data source/destination creation.

Use as a data source​

To create a new data flow, navigate to the Integrate section, and click the New Data Flow button. Select the Google Slides API connector tile, then select the credential that will be used to connect to the Google Slides API instance, and click Next; or, create a new Google Slides API credential for use in this flow.

Endpoint templates​

Nexla provides pre-built templates that can be used to rapidly configure data sources to ingest data from common Google Slides API endpoints. Select the endpoint from which this source will fetch data from the Endpoint pulldown menu. Available endpoint templates are listed in the expandable boxes below.

Get Presentation

Retrieves the full contents and metadata of a specific Google Slides presentation by its presentation ID. This is the primary endpoint for extracting the complete structure of a presentation, including all slides, their elements (text boxes, shapes, images, tables, and videos), speaker notes, page properties, and slide layout information. Use this endpoint when you need a comprehensive snapshot of a presentation for analysis, archiving, or downstream processing.

  • In the Presentation ID field, enter the unique identifier of the Google Slides presentation to retrieve. The presentation ID can be found in the presentation's URL:

    • For a URL such as https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgVE2upms/edit, the presentation ID is the string between /d/ and /edit — in this example, 1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgVE2upms.
  • The presentation must be accessible to the Google account used in the credential. Ensure the authenticated account has at least Viewer access to the presentation, or that the presentation is shared with the account's organization.
  • The response includes a slides array where each element represents one slide. To extract the slides as individual records, set the Path to Data field to $.slides[*] in the manual configuration, or rely on the template's default data path configuration.

The Get Presentation endpoint returns the entire presentation structure as a JSON object. The slides array is located at slides within the response, and each slide contains pageElements that describe the content on that slide. For complete response schema details, refer to the Google Slides API presentations.get reference.

Get Page

Retrieves the properties and content of a specific page (slide) within a presentation by its presentation ID and page object ID. Use this endpoint when you need detailed data about a single slide, including all of its page elements, layout, background, and notes page, without fetching the entire presentation.

  • Configure the following required parameters:

    • Presentation ID — The unique identifier of the Google Slides presentation. This can be found in the presentation URL between /d/ and /edit.
    • Page Object ID — The unique object ID of the specific slide (page) to retrieve. Page object IDs can be obtained by first calling the Get Presentation endpoint and extracting the objectId field from each entry in the slides array.
  • The endpoint returns a single page object containing all pageElements on that slide, such as text boxes, shapes, images, tables, and videos.
  • Speaker notes associated with the slide are available in the slideProperties.notesPage property of the response.

This endpoint is useful for targeted extraction of a specific slide when you already know its object ID. For retrieving all slides from a presentation at once, use the Get Presentation endpoint instead. Additional details are available in the Google Slides API presentations.pages.get reference.

Once the selected endpoint template has been configured, click the Test button to the right of the endpoint selection menu to retrieve a sample of the data that will be fetched. Sample data will be displayed in the Endpoint Test Result panel on the right, allowing you to verify that the source is configured correctly before saving.

Manual configuration​

Google Slides API data sources can also be manually configured to ingest data from any valid Google Slides API endpoint, including endpoints not covered by the pre-built templates, chained API calls, or custom request parameters. Select the Advanced tab at the top of the configuration screen, and follow the instructions in Connect to Any API to configure the API method, endpoint URL, date/time and lookup macros, path to data, metadata, and request headers.

Common Google Slides API base URLs include https://slides.googleapis.com/v1/presentations/{presentationId} (retrieve a full presentation) and https://slides.googleapis.com/v1/presentations/{presentationId}/pages/{pageObjectId} (retrieve a specific page). Replace {presentationId} with the actual presentation ID from the presentation URL, and {pageObjectId} with the specific slide's object ID.

Set the Path to Data to $.slides[*] to extract each slide in a presentation as an individual record. Presentation-level fields such as presentationId, title, pageSize, and locale sit outside that path and can be preserved on each record via the Path to Metadata in Response field.

The Authorization header containing the OAuth 2.0 access token is added automatically based on your credential and does not need to be included in the request headers.

Once all of the relevant settings have been configured, click the Create button in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the new Google Slides API data source. Nexla will now begin ingesting data from the configured endpoint and will organize any data that it finds into one or more Nexsets.

Use as a destination​

Click the + icon on the Nexset that will be sent to the Google Slides API destination, and select the Send to Destination option from the menu. Select the Google Slides API connector from the list of available destination connectors, then select the credential that will be used to connect to the Google Slides API, and click Next; or, create a new Google Slides API credential for use in this flow.

Manual configuration​

Google Slides API destinations are manually configured to send data to any valid Google Slides API endpoint. You can also configure Nexla to automatically send the response received from the Google Slides API after each call to a new Nexla webhook data source. Select the API method that will be used for calls to the Google Slides API from the Method pulldown menu — the most commonly used methods are POST (https://slides.googleapis.com/v1/presentations) to create a new, blank presentation, and POST (batchUpdate) (https://slides.googleapis.com/v1/presentations/{presentationId}:batchUpdate) to apply a series of updates to an existing presentation. Then follow the instructions in Connect to Any API to configure the content format, endpoint URL, request headers, attribute exclusions, record batching, and response webhooks.

The Google Slides API accepts JSON payloads — select JSON as the content format. The batchUpdate endpoint is the most powerful tool for modifying presentations: it accepts an array of requests objects in the request body, each specifying a particular type of update (such as insertText, createSlide, replaceAllText, or updatePageElementTransform). For a complete list of available request types, refer to the Google Slides API batchUpdate reference.

When batching records for the batchUpdate endpoint, select the Property Inside JSON Object grouping algorithm with the property name requests, since the endpoint expects an array of update request objects under that key. The Authorization header is added automatically based on your credential and does not need to be included in the request headers.

Save & activate​

Once all endpoint settings have been configured, click the Done button in the upper right corner of the screen to save and create the destination. To send the data to the configured Google Slides API endpoint, open the destination resource menu, and select Activate.

The Nexset data will not be sent to the Google Slides API endpoint until the destination is activated. Destinations can be activated immediately or at a later time, providing full control over data movement.