Customizing Google Slides masters to save time

A little while ago I read this post by Amy Lenord and realized that I wasn't using Google Slides to their fullest potential.

When I was making slides for my son's homework assignments, I realized that I could save time by customizing a master slide to fit my needs so that I could just click the slide type I wanted with the text already on it instead of retyping or copying and pasting.

I made custom master slides for words, sentences, and nonsense words for my son's homework so that I could just click the "add" button and my slide had everything except the homework word.

I use Google Slides to make my vocabulary lists for my Spanish classes, and then students go on gallery walks with a notes page to get their vocabulary for our unit (in normal times; not right now when we're not in school). I put the images in sheet protectors so I can re-use them, and put little sticky labels indicating whether they're for Spanish 1, 2, 3, or 4 since I frequently do our vocab days on the same day for all classes. I thought that was pretty clever, but then I realized that I could eliminate that step and save time by customizing my slide master.

I added a custom master slide layout with Spanish 1/Spanish 2/Spanish 3/Spanish 4 on the side.

My master slide layout menu.

The nice thing is that once you've used the slide layout, when you click the add button to add a new slide, Google Slides keeps using the last one you used until you tell it to use a layout. So I don't have to copy and paste to get the layout I want; I just click the add slide button and it gives me the layout I want.