Slides

Slides in Minion are made with Minion Deck Studio, an official app that runs on your minion. You build a deck by placing parts on slides, present it full-screen, and export it to PDF, PowerPoint or PNG. Minions use the same app, so asking one for “a deck” gives you something you can open and edit — not a file you have to move to another tool first.

Coming from the old slide editor?

Deck Studio replaces the slide editor that used to be built into Drive. Decks made there were exported to Drive as .mi-deck.zip files before it was retired; click one in Drive to keep editing it in Deck Studio.

Deck Studio’s interface is currently in Japanese. This guide gives each button’s label as it appears on screen.

Setting it up

Deck Studio is experimental, like the other Minion Apps: a workspace admin turns Minion Apps on first.

1. Open Apps, find Minion Deck Studio in the catalog and choose Deploy to a Minion.
2. For workspace members to use it, open the minion’s page and, under Minion Apps, select the workspaces that may open it.
3. Open it from Apps in this workspace at the top of Apps, or from the Apps tab of the minion’s window.

Decks are stored on the minion the app runs on. To keep a copy, or to carry a deck to another minion, save it to Drive (below).

Building a deck

Create one with 新しいデッキを作る (New deck) in the deck list. It starts with a title slide.

• Insert parts from the toolbar — title, subtitle, body, bullets, caption and image. Each lands in a sensible position. Images can also be pasted (Ctrl/Cmd+V) or dropped onto the slide
• Move by dragging and resize from the four corners. Parts snap to each other, to the edges and centre of the slide, and to a grid, with guide lines showing what lined up. Hold Alt to suspend snapping; hold Shift on a corner to keep the aspect ratio
• Edit text by double-clicking a part: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text colour, highlight, and bulleted and numbered lists
• Look comes from the theme: a part’s role (title, body and so on) decides its size, weight, colour and spacing, so a deck stays consistent. For a single part you can override the alignment, font size and colour
• Slides can be added, duplicated, reordered and deleted, with a background colour or image, speaker notes, and a switch to skip a slide when presenting
• Undo / redo with Ctrl/Cmd+Z and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z

Changes save to the minion automatically. If someone else — another tab, a teammate or a minion — saved the same deck first, nothing is overwritten: you choose between opening the latest version and keeping yours as a separate deck.

Overflow and off-slide warnings

Text that no longer fits its box gets a red outline showing how far it overflows, and a part that sits partly outside the slide gets an orange dashed outline. Counts appear in the slide list and in the header, so you notice problems on slides you don’t have open. They never block an export — whether to fix them is your call.

Presenting

▶ プレゼン (Present) opens the deck full-screen in a new tab.

Key	Action
→ / Space / PageDown / Enter / click	Next slide
← / PageUp / Backspace	Previous slide
Home / End	First / last slide
F	Toggle full screen

Skipped slides are left out.

Exporting

書き出す (Export) offers PDF and PowerPoint for the whole deck, and PNG for the slide you have open.

• Skipped slides are left out of PDF and PowerPoint
• In PowerPoint, text stays text you can edit, and speaker notes come along. If the recipient doesn’t have Noto Sans JP installed, PowerPoint substitutes a font and line breaks may fall differently
• The Japanese and emoji fonts ship with the app, so a PDF or PNG looks the same whichever minion produced it
• A deck with a missing image doesn’t export until the image is replaced or removed

Exports are drawn on the minion in a headless browser. Managed minions have one; on a self-hosted minion, run npx playwright install chromium (or install Google Chrome) if exporting reports that no browser is available.

Saving to and opening from Drive

ドライブに保存 (Save to Drive) puts a file into a workspace folder you choose:

• The deck itself, as a .mi-deck.zip — the form you can keep editing
• A PDF, PowerPoint or PNG export

Drive never overwrites: each save is a new file, with the date and time in the default name.

To open a deck from Drive, click the .mi-deck.zip in Drive, or use ドライブから開く (Open from Drive) in the deck list. Opening the same file again takes you to the deck it was imported into the first time.

If you’ll be presenting somewhere the minion may not be reachable, save a PDF to Drive beforehand — Drive opens PDFs on its own.

Asking a minion

Minions build and revise decks through Deck Studio’s API: they write the slides, check for overflow, look at a rendered image of each slide they changed, and export when asked.

Put together a deck for Monday's review: Q2 revenue trend, the milestones we hit,
and the three risks for Q3. Keep it under 8 slides, and put a PDF in the Reviews folder.

If Deck Studio isn’t on the minion, it will ask you to deploy it rather than turning to an outside presentation tool.

Current limits

• Fixed 1280×720 (16:9) slides
• One built-in theme; no slide masters, transitions or animations
• Parts are text and images only — no shapes or rotation, and charts go in as images
• No import from PowerPoint or Google Slides