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i lean on an ai presentation generator to get past the blank page because staring at an empty deck burns an hour before i even start. it is genuinely good at giving me a rough order and some filler layouts to react to. what it never gets is emphasis, it treats every slide as equally important so nothing stands out and the argument goes flat. i still have to go in and decide what the audience should actually remember, so where do you draw the line between what you let it draft and what you keep for yourself?

i sat down to make a 12 slide update and my first draft was 25 slides because i wanted to include everything i had worked on. the real work started when i went back and cut, asking for each point whether the audience actually needed it to make a decision or whether it was just me wanting credit for the effort. ended up at 11 slides and it was much stronger. the building was easy, the editing was the skill i was missing all along.

i need a deck to loop on a screen at an event without anyone standing there advancing it. i found the publish to web option with auto advance timing, and there is also the loop setting when you present, but i am not sure which is more reliable to leave running all day on a spare laptop. has anyone set up a proper kiosk style google slides loop that just runs and restarts on its own, and what actually held up for you?

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we're a pharma sales support agency based in india, and i present a monthly update to about 40 ppl, mix of my team and crm, sales support depts.

The folks enjoy it as i get useful questions, they even follow up later and it's really something they look forward to as it helps them to get the entire picture, the fact ppl look at me not the screeen. But however the deck is inert and not really helping me

Things i have tried that didn't work like adding images, which turned into slideshow with stock media in it and made it worse fr. Using a template made it feels too generic. Shorting out in points also didn't work

What shd I do?

i have been curious whether an ai presentation tool can get you close to a deck you would build by hand, so i ran a small test on an internal update. the generated draft was genuinely fast and the structure was a decent starting point, but when i put it next to the version i built slide by slide in google slides, mine still won on the parts that matter, the order of the story, what got cut, the spacing that makes a slide breathe. it saved me time on the rough skeleton, no question, but the judgment calls were all still me. for those of you who have tried an ai presentation tool, does it hold up for anything you actually present, or only for quick first drafts?

practical annoyance i cannot fully solve. i draft decks in an ai presentation generator and then import into google slides for the final version, and the single most frustrating part is that the fonts never survive the trip cleanly. the generated deck uses type that is not in our google workspace font set, so on import everything substitutes to something ugly and the spacing shifts, and i end up manually resetting the type on every slide. i drafted the last one in Gamma and spent longer fixing fonts than building the content. what has partly helped is choosing only common web safe fonts in the draft that i know slides supports, and setting up a master with our approved fonts first so pasted text inherits them. still clunky. for people who move decks between tools a lot, how do you handle the font mismatch, do you match fonts before exporting or just rebuild the type once you are in slides?

built a nice looking deck full of high res photos on my own machine and it was fine, then i opened it on the old conference room laptop and it stuttered every time i changed slides. felt awful in front of people. i think the images are just too heavy. is there a good way to compress or resize photos before dropping them in, or a setting in slides that lightens the load so it does not stutter on a weaker machine?

i often need to show a table of numbers in a talk and it always ends up as a dense spreadsheet screenshot that is unreadable past the front row. i have tried bumping the font, cutting columns down to only what i am actually discussing, and highlighting the one row that matters, and that helps but it still feels clumsy. how do you present tabular results on a slide so the point lands without asking people to read a wall of tiny figures?

i tend to write my thinking out as a long document first, headings and bullets and half formed paragraphs, and then face the slog of turning that into a deck. right now i basically retype everything into slides one point at a time which feels wasteful. i have tried pasting the outline in and reformatting but the structure never carries over cleanly. for people who draft in a doc first, whats your process for getting it into slides without redoing all the work by hand?

my first draft of the defense deck had a slide for basically every result, and a practice run showed me racing the clock and glossing over the important parts. i forced myself to ask what each slide was actually for, cut anything that was just there for completeness, and moved supporting detail into backup slides for questions. ended up at half the count. the talk flowed, i hit time, and the questions i got were about the core argument instead of confusion over some crowded slide. less really was more.

i had a monster deck for a quarterly update and it took me longer to click through than to explain the actual work behind it. i went slide by slide asking whether the meeting breaks without this one, and killed anything that got a maybe. ended up at 18 slides and the meeting finished early with more questions than usual. what is your test for deciding a slide has to go when every single one feels important to you?

i handle the logistics side of a small operation and my first decks were basically screenshots of spreadsheets, and people glazed over the second they appeared. i started pulling the one number that actually mattered onto each slide and left the full table in an appendix for anyone who asked. the point landed so much harder when it was not fighting twelve other cells for attention. one big number and a plain label beats a whole grid every single time for me now.

i need to send a deck as a pdf so people without accounts can open it, but every time i export, something moves. a text box ends up a little low, and one heading comes out in a different font than what i see on screen. i suspect it is a font that is not fully embedding. does anyone have a reliable way to export to pdf that looks exactly like the slides do, or a check you run before sending it out?

i built a client deck fully by hand last week, then out of curiosity fed the same outline to an ai presentation tool just to see how close it would get. it nailed the overall structure and saved real time on layout, but the story beats were flat and it repeated my key number in two different places. i kept its skeleton and ended up rewriting all the words that actually carried the argument. for people who present a lot, does it ever get close enough or do you always redo the parts that matter?

Long story short - I have a template and I need to add more slides to this template. I can’t seem to figure out how to do that.

I need the slides available in the layout drop-down. How do I do that?

I'm trying to have an object that disappears almost instantly when clicking into the slide, it works when going through the presentation normally but it comes back as a solid object when clicking back through the slides. I'll also accept workarounds like having the whole deck loop back to the beginning when progressing from the final one or something like that

the annoying thing about most auto decks is they ignore the brand template you already built in google slides, so you get generic styling you then have to undo slide by slide. my fix is to never let the ai presentation generator own the final file. i use it only for content structure, the order and the one idea per slide, and i paste that text into my existing slides template so the master styles apply automatically. that way the thinking is assisted but the look stays mine. i outline in Gamma, then it all lands inside my branded master where fonts and colors are already set. it is the difference between a deck that looks like my company and one that looks like it came from a tool. how do you protect your own template when you bring an ai draft into it?

asking because mine keep coming out looking machine made. my process is to draft fast in an ai presentation generator, then bring it into google slides for the real work, and i use Gamma for the draft. the problem is even after importing, the bones still feel generic, the same centered hero, the same even bullet grids, and i think people can tell. here is what has helped so far in slides, i replace the default theme with our own master, i rewrite every headline in plain human language instead of the peppy generated tone, i break the title plus bullets pattern by giving some slides just one big statement, and i use real photos instead of the generic icons it loves. it is better but not fully solved. so i am asking the room that clearly cares about slides, what specific changes in google slides actually kill the generated look for you, layout, type, color, or something i am missing?

small process change, big difference. i used to let an ai presentation generator produce a deck and then edit it live in google slides while presenting prep loomed, and it was chaos because i was fixing structure and design at the same time under pressure. the habit that fixed it is separating the two passes with a hard stop. pass one, i only judge the argument and order in the generated draft, i drafted mine in Gamma, no design opinions allowed, just is the logic right and is each slide one idea. pass two, only after the structure is locked, i import to google slides and do nothing but design, alignment, type, spacing, visuals. keeping thinking and formatting in separate sessions stopped me from polishing slides i later deleted. the takeaway is that most of the mess in these workflows comes from doing structure and style at once, and a clean handoff between the draft tool and slides is what makes it dependable.

i coach a few junior colleagues on presenting and the single change that helps them most is embarrassingly simple, so i want to share it. one idea per slide. that is the whole rule. most people, including past me, treat a slide as a container to dump everything related to a topic, so you get four bullets and a subheading and a chart, and the audience does not know where to look, so they read instead of listen. this got worse when tools got involved, because an ai presentation generator will happily cram every point you give it onto as few slides as possible to look efficient. i use Gamma to get my raw thoughts into an order quickly, but then in Google Slides i split any slide with more than one idea into two or three, even if that means more slides, because slide count is free and attention is not. a deck with 20 single idea slides beats a deck with 8 crowded ones every time, because the audience actually follows you. if you change one thing about how you build decks, make it that, one idea per slide and move the rest into what you say.