Presentations · Glossary
What are slide roles?
A slide role is the job a slide is doing rather than how it looks: a cover, an agenda, a metrics slide, a comparison, a timeline, a process, a closing. There are twenty six of them, each with its own set of fields, so choosing the role decides what the slide can hold before you choose which layout to use.
Thinking in roles is the difference between a deck that argues something and a deck that is a series of attractive rectangles.
Nuwan Madhusanka · Co-founder
3 min read · Published
The role decides the fields
Each role has a vocabulary: the specific slots a slide of that kind may carry. A metrics slide has numbers with labels and captions. A timeline has periods, each with a date, a label and a body. A comparison has two or more sides. Because the fields are defined by the role rather than by the individual template, swapping to a different layout of the same role carries your content across intact.
Some roles are far better stocked than others
The distribution is uneven, and it tells you something about what decks actually need. Metrics, pillars and comparison carry the most layouts, in the thirties; cover, framework, diagram and content are close behind; the specialist roles such as calendar, code, question and answer and quiz carry a handful each. If a role has thirty layouts it is because people build that slide constantly.
Picking the role before the picture
The useful discipline is to decide what the slide is doing, choose the role, then choose among its layouts by how much content you have. Doing it the other way, picking a layout you liked the look of and pouring content into it, is how a comparison ends up as a pillars slide with arrows drawn on, which tells the reader something untrue about the relationship between the items.
Questions people ask
How many slide roles are there?
Twenty six, each with its own vocabulary of fields. They range from the structural ones every deck uses, cover, agenda, divider, closing, to specialist ones like calendar, code and quiz that only some decks need.
Can one slide have two roles?
A template has a primary role and can be cross listed under others, which is why filtering by a purpose sometimes returns more layouts than the primary count. The slide itself does one job; the cross listing just means the layout suits more than one.
What happens to my content if I change layout?
It carries across, because layouts of the same role share slot names. Content with no matching box is parked rather than deleted and comes back if you switch to a layout that has one. That is what makes trying three layouts a cheap experiment.
Which role should I use for three benefits?
Pillars, if the three are all true at once and swapping two of them changes nothing. If they happen in order, it is a process; if they are dated, it is a timeline. The test of swapping two items is the fastest way to tell those three apart.
Does the generator choose roles for me?
Yes, it picks a sequence of roles from your brief and then a layout for each. That is why a longer, more specific brief produces a better structured deck: it gives the generator the material to decide that you need a comparison here and a timeline there.
Make one with presentations
The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match your own.
Create a presentation with OneCraftRelated questions
- How many slides in a pitch deck?Ten to fifteen for a first meeting, and the count matters less than which slides. What has to be there, what belongs in an appendix, and why.
- Editable PPTX against image PPTXAn image PPTX is one picture per slide. An editable PPTX rebuilds text, tables and charts as real PowerPoint objects you can edit after export.
- What are speaker notes?Speaker notes are what you say, stored per slide and never shown on it. Where they appear, what they do not travel with, and who else can read them.
Sources
Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .