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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I was just wondering today why Google doesn’t have an infinite canvas product. All I want is Google Slides with an infinite canvas.

Products like Figma, Miro, and Excalidraw are all great, but they’re not integrated into Google Workspace like Docs/Slides. I like comments, tagging users, auto-completing links to other docs with their title, etc.

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Google had something called Jamboard that kinda fits the description. But Google being Google, it was recently discontinued.

Jamboard was never an infinite canvas. It was a very awkward thing that didn't allow you to select multiple items at once (or if it did, I never discovered how), or to expand the canvas to accommodate more content.

Agree. The fixed canvas size in Jamboard is incredibly annoying and limiting.

Google slides has other pretty major problems for presenting things.

Notably if your corporate identity requires the use of a specific font, then its not possible.

Figma is a lot better in this regard, but the pricing is aggressive for the design part.

Even when you pay for enterprise, Google support will say things like, “Just change your brand font to use a Google Font!” It’s pretty awful and arrogant.

I understand a large amount of the technical and legal reasons for this, but I agree.

It hurts my position greatly as an advocate of their services internally and leads to us having to use Powerpoint anyway.

Object sizing and alignment is also garbage, barely functional, and has not been fixed in decades.

I worked somewhere where they went through this and got a custom font added: https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/170jgfl/upload_cust...

Pretty disappointing and convoluted though.

Try Canva whiteboards. You can embed an inf canvas into slides

They do, but it’s not easy to use.

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