One of the most familiar collaboration features in Google Docs is the ability to see what your fellow collaborators are working on with real-time text cursors. This allows you to see changes as they are being made, and who is making them.

Although Google Slides has a lot of the same collaboration features as Google Docs, this one feature is something we’ve come to expect with our frequent use of Docs. Yesterday the Google Drive team announced that real-time text cursors were finally coming to Slides, along with some other great updates.

Reuse custom themes in new presentations

There may come a time when you want to reuse a theme that you worked hard to create, and now you can—just select “From another presentation…” in the theme chooser.

Add objects to themes and layouts

While editing a slide, you can now right click on any object and add it to a theme or a specific layout so that the next time you want to use it, it will already be part of the slide template.

Update text styles in placeholders

Let’s say you’re editing a body placeholder, and you change the font of your text (or other style properties, such as bold, color, etc.). You can now easily apply this formatting across slides that use the same layout by right clicking on the placeholder and selecting “Update in theme.”

For more information, check out the original announcement on the Google Drive Blog.