How to Connect Google Slides to Claude?

Before you start

You need a SourcetoMCP account with a brand created, a Claude account, and a Google account with edit rights on the decks in question. If you want the linked-chart workflow further down, connect Google Sheets as well, because the chart is read from a spreadsheet that SourcetoMCP has to reach separately.

Connect Google Slides to SourcetoMCP

1. 1From your dashboard, go to Connectors → Add a connection.
2. 2Find the Google Slides card and select Connect.
3. 3Sign in with the Google account that can open the decks you want. SourcetoMCP asks for Google's drive.file permission, which covers individual files you choose and nothing else in your Drive.
4. 4Select + Choose presentations from Google Drive. The picker is Google's, not ours, and it runs with Google's own temporary access, which is why it can show you a list we could never fetch ourselves.
5. 5Pick one or more presentations and confirm. Each becomes its own entry on your Connections page.

Repeat the flow whenever you want to add another deck. Picking a file is the only thing that grants access to it, so nothing else in the same folder becomes reachable along the way.

Add SourcetoMCP as a connector in Claude

Claude adds every custom connector the same way, under Customize then Connectors. These steps are that flow pointed at SourcetoMCP.

1. 1In SourcetoMCP, open Connect an agent from the dashboard sidebar and copy your server address (it looks like https://sourcetomcp.com/api/mcp).
2. 2In Claude, open Customize, then Connectors.
3. 3Select +, then Add custom connector.
4. 4Paste in your server address. You can leave Advanced settings alone, because SourcetoMCP runs its own OAuth and never needs a client ID or secret from you.
5. 5Click Add.
6. 6The first time Claude uses it, you'll be asked to sign in to SourcetoMCP and approve access, the same OAuth approval you'd see connecting any other app. After that it reconnects on its own.

On a Team or Enterprise plan, only an Owner can add a connector, from Organization settings, then Connectors. Everyone else then opens Customize → Connectors and clicks Connect to sign in with their own SourcetoMCP account, so each person only ever reaches the sources their own account can see.

Ask Claude about your decks

Adding the connector makes it available, and you still switch it on per conversation. In a chat, select the + button, choose Connectors, and toggle SourcetoMCP on.

Claude can list the elements on a slide, read speaker notes, and pull a thumbnail to see how a slide actually looks before changing it. Try something like:

1. 1Read the speaker notes across the deck and tell me what is missing.
2. 2Add a closing slide with the same background as slide 2.
3. 3Move the logo on every slide to the top right corner.
4. 4Swap the placeholder box on slide 4 for this image.
5. 5Embed the product walkthrough video on the last slide.

Building a deck from one template slide

Design a single slide the way you want it, with placeholder text like {{client}} and {{quarter}}. Ask Claude to duplicate that slide once per client and replace the placeholders on each copy. The layout, fonts and brand colours carry over untouched, because duplicating a real slide keeps its styling rather than rebuilding it from scratch. This is the workflow the connector is built around.

Charts that stay linked to Sheets

If you also connect Google Sheets, Claude can place a chart from a spreadsheet onto a slide and keep it linked, then refresh it later when the numbers change. That saves rebuilding a monthly deck by hand. Both connections need to exist for this, since they are two separate sources in SourcetoMCP.

A note on write actions

Slides is a build-and-edit connector rather than a reporting one: 27 of its 31 operations change the deck. Claude can delete a slide, remove an element, or replace an image, and the change lands in the Google file with no undo on our side. Google's version history under File then Version history is the way back. Worth knowing before you ask for a restyle: brightness, contrast and cropping on an image are read-only in Google's own Slides API, so Claude can change an image's outline but cannot recolour or crop it, even though the Slides editor lets you do that by hand.

Troubleshooting

The deck isn't in the picker: the picker only lists files the signed-in Google account can already open. Share the presentation with that account in Google Drive first, then reopen the picker.

Claude edited the wrong shape: shapes are addressed by id, not by what they look like. Ask it to list the elements on that slide first, then name the one you mean.

There is no Connectors option under Customize: on Team and Enterprise plans an Owner adds connectors for the whole organisation. Ask an Owner to add it from Organization settings → Connectors, and it will then show up for you to connect.

Claude won't let you add another connector: Free accounts can keep one custom connector at a time. Remove the one you have, or move to Pro or Max.

Revoking access

Worth doing before a deck goes out: drop it from your Connections page once the work is finished, so a presentation you are about to share externally is no longer reachable by an agent. Withdrawing the Google permission entirely is a separate step, under your Google Account in Data and privacy.

Still stuck?

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