Hi Reader,
​

Jez pushed a HUGE slides update live last night, and you'll notice some of it the second you open a deck!

A brand new sidebar

The old sidebar had six tabs... and you had to remember which tab everything lived in. Now it's all in one place, sorted the way you actually use it.

The things you reach for most sit right at the top: text box, table, list, sticky note and mind map. Underneath are your tools (pen, highlighter, eraser and pointer), then your snippets, lines and shapes, pictures and videos, and finally the long list of apps, sorted into categories. And your favourite apps come first!

Can't see what you need? There's one search box for everything. Type what you want, press Enter, and it drops straight into the middle of your slide. (Keyboard fans, Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) jumps straight to the search!)

Tables are HERE!

You can now add a table to any slide, and it works just like it does in PowerPoint. Rows grow to fit your text, and you can add, delete and resize rows and columns in a click.

Wordabase now lives inside The Hive!

You'll find Wordabase right there in your left menu, so you no longer need to jump across to the Mrs Learning Bee website. Browse words by sound, spelling, syllable type, skill or early learners. We’ve made it a breeze to build up a collection of words and save them as a new Word Bank or add them to an existing one.

You can create your own word, sound, sentence or even question banks. Pop any of them into games like Four in a Roll, Tic Tac Toe, Rocket Launch and more in a simple click! (And yesssss - lots more games are on the way very soon!!)

Goodbye, pesky paper cuts!

Jez has also been busy fixing a whole lot of little things that were slowing you down:

• Frustrated when students accidentally delete or move something they shouldn’t when presenting? We’ve now added a Student Touch control in presentation mode which has 3 tiers of object manipulation restriction to choose from. (Shout out to Rebecca who alerted us to this in the Hive Staffroom forum! We loooove actioning your requests!!)

• App settings now appear close to the app they’re affecting rather than replacing your sidebar content

• Similarly, slide settings (like background selection) are opened from the top left of the slide in an adjacent popover

• Copy something and paste it onto another slide, and it lands in exactly the same spot.
• The presenting toolbar fits better on smaller screens, even with sidebars open.
• Shapes, lines, arrows etc can now all be fine-tuned with any fill and border colour. Look for the “Detailed” style view when editing any shape

What's next?

Jez is already working on the next round, and click-to-reveal animations (and more) are top of the list! You'll be able to hide something on a slide and reveal it with a click, right when you're ready for it. This will form the basis of more animation styles in the future!

We'll also begin work on slide templates/snippets to make them more intuitive and useful day-to-day; we truly think they can supercharge your slide creation!

Lastly, we’re finalising a big batch of new digital learning tools for maths - we know you’re going to looooove them!

And there's plenty more on the way after that...

➜ [Open The Hive and have a play.]

As always, if something isn't working the way you expected, just hit reply and tell us. No idea is too small!

Have a wonderful rest of the week, and enjoy the new sidebar!

Love,
Tam and Jez

P.S. What you can't see is that all of this sits on top of MONTHS of behind-the-scenes work Jez has done to get The Hive ready for school subscriptions. It's going to make it SO much easier to ask your school to pay for your subscription… which is our ultimate goal! More on that very soon!