Four new slide types this month, most of them built for the moment a room needs waking up, plus quieter fixes to importing, exporting and reviewing answers.
There is a stretch in almost every session, usually the half hour after lunch, where you can feel people drifting. Eyes on laps. Nobody quite ready to volunteer for anything. It is not you. Focused attention on a screen now runs about 47 seconds before we switch to something else — that is the researcher Gloria Mark’s figure, tracked over two decades — and a room full of people is a room full of 47-second timers.
Almost everything below is an answer to that stretch. I cannot take credit for any of it: I do not build these things. I read what you send us, I sit in on sessions, and I carry the patterns back to the people who do. Nearly all of it started with someone outside this office saying it out loud first.
This month’s highlights
Duck Race: ducks race across your screen and one of them makes the decision nobody wanted to make.
True or False: the fastest question you can write. Type a statement, let the room swipe, then reveal.
Duck Race: let a duck make the call
Someone has to go first. Someone has to take the task nobody wants. And when you pick that person yourself, it always lands a little flat.
What it feels like: you add the slide, you press present, and a row of ducks paddles across the screen while everyone leans in. One wins. Setup takes seconds and there is nothing to learn.
What’s new: Duck Race is our second fully gamified slide after the Spinner Wheel. You can set the leaderboard to show just the winner or every racer, and there are new duck designs and a 2.5D background to pick from.
Why I think you’ll love it: picking a name yourself is a decision, and decisions invite an argument. Handing it to a duck turns the same moment into something the room watches together. Use it for a giveaway winner, the task nobody volunteers for, or who is choosing lunch on Friday.
Help Centre article: Using the Duck Race slide
True or False: turn any statement into a showdown
Some questions do not need four options. They need one claim and a room willing to commit to an answer.
What it feels like: add the slide, type your statement, present. Everyone swipes True or False from their phone, then you reveal, and you get the small collective gasp that comes with it.
What’s new: True or False is the first slide type to arrive through our Slide Marketplace, so it is also a preview of how quickly new slide types can reach you from now on.
Why I think you’ll love it: this is the question you can write while you are talking. It is made for the myth you know half the room believes, for checking what people think they already know before you teach it, and for an icebreaker you can set up in ten seconds.
Help Centre article: Using the True or False slide
Interactive Image: content people explore at their own pace
This one is not a poll or a quiz. It is for delivering content, which is a different job.
What it feels like: you upload one image and pin up to eight notes on the spots that matter. Your audience taps the pins on their own phones and reads at their own speed while you keep talking.
What’s new: a slide type for the times the thing on screen needs labels, not votes. Label a diagram: anatomy, machine parts, a floor plan. Walk through safety steps on a real photo of the real room. Or run team intros from one group photo with a note behind every face.
Why I think you’ll love it: the person sitting at the back who cannot read your labels now has the whole thing in their hand. No scores, no votes, just your content, explored at their pace instead of yours.
Help Centre article: Using the Interactive Image slide
Photo Share: let the room show you something
Another one that is not a poll or a quiz. This one is for the room to show up.
What it feels like: you ask for a photo, and your audience uploads one straight from their phone — no app, no login. The photos land on your screen live, and you choose how they play: an auto carousel, a Ken Burns pan-and-zoom, theatre, spotlight, a photo wall or masonry.
What’s new: a brand-new slide type for the moments a picture beats a sentence. There are no scores and no winner, and moderation is there if you want to approve photos before they appear.
Why I think you’ll love it: it is made for icebreakers (“show us your desk”, “snap your pet”, “your view right now”), for events where a live photo wall fills up as the session runs, and for workshops where every team sends a photo of what they built and you spotlight them one at a time.
Help Centre article: Using the Photo Share slide
AhaSlides Survey: know who answered
If you use surveys to understand your learners over time, this one is for you.
What it feels like: the same survey you already build, with the option to ask people to sign in first, so every response comes back with a name attached.
What’s new:
- Your choice, per survey. Standalone surveys shared by link or QR can stay anonymous (the default) or require sign-in. Open the survey editor, click Settings, and toggle on Require sign-in. It is available on all plans, including free.
- Clear to the people answering. When sign-in is required, respondents see a sign-in screen before they answer, so they know upfront that their identity is collected and visible to you.
- See who said what. Results show which respondent gave each answer, and let you view everything one person submitted together.
- Nothing already collected gets rewritten. Change the setting later and past responses keep the identity level they had when they were submitted.
Why I think you’ll love it: for pre and post course surveys, an anonymous response is a dead end. Being able to follow one learner across a programme is the difference between a satisfaction score and knowing whether your teaching landed.
Help Centre article: How to create and run surveys
My Answers: participants can look back at everything now
A customer wrote to us about this. They were building a leadership course with multiple sessions and wanted people to be able to go back and see what they had written. They could not, because My Answers only ever covered four slide types.
What’s new: on the audience side, My Answers now covers every slide type, not just Pick Answer, Short Answer, Match Pairs and Correct Order. Whatever someone submitted, they can review it.
Good to know: answers take up to around two minutes to appear, so someone checking the instant they submit may need to wait a moment.
Why I think you’ll love it: what people write in the room is often the most useful thing they take away from it. Now they get to keep it.
Help Centre article: Review your answers and slides
Importing and exporting, smoother in both directions
Both sides of getting slides in and out of AhaSlides had an upgrade this month.
Bringing slides in: your slides now appear in the list one by one as they import. You can preview and edit the ones that have landed while the rest keep coming. No more staring at a loading bar wondering whether it worked. This covers uploads from your device, files you hand to the AI chatbot, and Google Drive and OneDrive sync. One thing to know: cancelling an import part way through is not possible yet, but it is on the way.
Taking slides out: you can now choose to include your speaker notes as annotations when you download a PDF, from the editor view and the session report. Large decks (we tested past 300 slides) download safely, and Idea Board slides with more submissions than fit on one screen now export properly instead of getting cut off.
Help Centre articles: Importing a PowerPoint presentation or PDF · Export slides to PDF or images
Smaller things that make the day easier
- Two new languages. Suomi (Finnish) and Македонски (Macedonian) are now available in both the presenter and audience apps.
- A faster language switcher. Your recently used languages now sit at the top of the list, so switching back and forth takes one glance instead of a long scroll. How to change the display language
- Audio settings where you’d expect them. Slide audio now lives in the Content tab and presentation audio in the Settings tab, so you are not hunting between the two.
Every one of these came from watching how you present and listening to what you told us. The My Answers change above started as one email from a consultant running a leadership course, so if there is something you wish AhaSlides did but does not yet, tell me. I read these.
Here’s to your next full room,
Cheryl 
Head of Growth, AhaSlides