A deck is built from the Slide Deck panel, one slide per point you mean to make. Every slide page is in it already; add any other page by picking it from the list at the bottom of the panel and pressing Add as slide. Each row shows the slide's position, its name, and the tab and page it shows, plus a marker when it has notes or is hidden.
Building and presenting a deck needs edit access: on a view-only or participant link the Slide Deck tool isn't offered.
A row does one thing: press it to open that slide. The editor switches to that slide's tab and page, which is how you check a slide without presenting it. Everything you can do to a slide lives in its … menu instead, so a panel the width of the palette never has to carry five controls per row.
The slide menu
Press the … at the right of a row and you get the same shape of menu the Explorer's rows and the tab context menu use: a row of quick actions across the top, then a labelled category you can open.
The quick actions are Rename, notes (Add notes, or Edit notes once there are some, lit when the slide has a script waiting), Duplicate (a copy of the slide straight after it, for a "same picture, different point" pair) and Delete, pinned to the right on its own.
Deleting asks first. A confirmation opens beside the menu button. Deleting a slide never deletes its page: the page stays. A slide page's own slide has no Delete, since the deck would put it straight back; hide it instead.
Visibility: hiding a slide from the run
The menu's Visibility category carries a single switch: Hide the slide, or Show it again.
Hiding is a different idea from deleting. It is for the slide you might want next week, the backup detail for a question you may not get, the section you cut for time: the slide stays in the deck, it just doesn't run. A hidden slide shows in the panel with its name struck through and an eye marker beside it, so you can always see it is there.
Hidden slides are skipped everywhere at once: the count on the Present button, the 7 / 23 in the presenter's display, the jump list, and what advancing lands on all leave them out, so nothing can disagree about how long the deck is.
Ordering the deck
Drag a row up or down the list to move it. The list does not reshuffle while you drag: a caret shows where the row will land, and the move happens when you let go, because a list that reorders live moves the very row you were aiming at. It works on touch as well as with a mouse.
Presenter notes
Open a slide's … menu and press Add notes, and a notes box opens under the list: what you mean to say over this slide. Press Done to put it away again. It is behind the menu rather than always on screen so the panel never grows a text area you did not ask for.
Notes belong to the slide, not to anything on it, which matters because the same box on two slides usually wants two different sentences said about it. They are plain text, since it is a script you read off rather than something anybody needs to bold, and during the presentation they stay hidden until you ask for them.
A time budget per slide
Under the notes box sits Budget, a number of minutes for this slide, shown while you present once you turn the budget on in the presenter settings. It is blank for most slides and that is the normal case; fill it in for the ones you know you tend to overrun.
It sits with the notes deliberately: both are decided while you are writing the talk, not while you are giving it. While you present, a slide with a budget can show time-on-this-slide against it in the presenter's display, and going over is marked rather than enforced. See the pacing display.
Build the deck in the order you will speak, then walk it once by pressing each row in turn. You are checking that every slide's elements make sense on their own, which is the one thing the panel cannot tell you.
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