Google Slides puts your speaker notes in a presenter view window, and presenter view is a window like any other — which means the moment you share your entire screen, your notes are part of the presentation. Sharing only the slideshow window keeps them private, right up until you need to switch to a demo and have to stop and restart the share.
The CueCard browser extension takes the notes out of that window entirely. It reads the speaker notes for the slide you are on and hands them to the desktop app, which is excluded from screen capture. Your notes are on your screen, following your deck, and not in the share.
What presenter view does not give you
- Nowhere safe to put it. Two windows, one display, and a share that has to include one of them.
- A wall of text. The notes pane prints your whole note for the slide at one size, with nothing marked as more important than anything else.
- No clock per section. There is a timer for the talk. There is nothing telling you that slide six was supposed to be ninety seconds and has been four minutes.
- It breaks when you leave. Alt-tab out of a full-screen slideshow to show something and the arrangement you set up falls apart.
How the sync works
- Install CueCard for macOS or Windows — free, open source, macOS 13 or later, Windows 10 or later.
- Add the browser extension for Chrome, Firefox or Safari. The Safari one is installed by the macOS app; the others come from their own stores, linked on the Google Slides page.
- Open your presentation and present as you always do. The notes for the current slide appear in CueCard and change as you advance.
No copying, no second document to keep in step with the deck. Edit a note in Slides and the note you read is the note you edited.
Then add the two things Slides has no field for
Speaker notes are just text, which means they can carry more than words:
[time 02:00]on a slide counts down on screen while you talk it. Put one on every section that has ever run long and the whole talk stays inside its slot.[cue take a breath],[cue click the demo],[cue hand over to Sam]are drawn in the cue colour and never read out — they are directions to you, sitting in the middle of the note where you need them.
Fade the window back with the transparency control if it is sitting over your deck, or bring it forward when the room goes quiet and you need the words.
It is invisible, not just tidy
CueCard is excluded from screen capture at the operating-system level, so it stays out of Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles and screen recordings alike. Share your entire screen, switch to a browser, run the demo, come back to the deck — the notes never appear in any of it. Check that Ghost Mode is on in Settings and do one practice call to see it for yourself.
And if the deck is not in Slides
The sync is a convenience, not a requirement. Paste your notes straight into CueCard and present from PowerPoint, Keynote, a PDF, a browser or nothing at all — the window behaves identically. Download CueCard and get your notes off the shared screen.