I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.

There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?

There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:

Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).

/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape file.svg --export-filename=file.emf

Upload the EMF file to Google Drive with content type “application/x-msmetafile”.

rclone copyto --http-headers '"Content-Type","application/x-msmetafile"' file.emf gdrive:file.emf

Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.

Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.

Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!

Wow! Thanks for this!

This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).

Totally with you on Google's lack of SVG support. SVG works fine in PowerPoint, and Keynote even lets you break SVGs apart[1]. It's embarrassing that Google were beaten by both MS and Apple on basic web standards support.

It also really stinks at resizing raster images, as does all Gsuite apps. It makes diagrams look terrible.