Last Wednesday I had 40 minutes to build a training deck for a client onboarding session. No designer, no template, just 1,900 words of half-organised notes and an open Google Slides tab. I’ve done this about a dozen times now, and the workflow below is the version that finally stopped producing decks I had to rebuild from scratch.
What follows is a walkthrough, not an overview: the actual input I pasted, the settings I changed, and the specific edits that turned the output into something I’d genuinely present.
Start with the content you already have
SlidesAI runs two ways. There’s a web app where you paste text and download the result, and there’s a Google Slides add-on that drops generated slides straight into the presentation you already have open. Learn the add-on first. Exporting a .pptx and re-uploading it is a step you don’t need.
You can seed it three different ways:
- Paste text. Best for notes, a rough outline, or a document you’ve already written. This is my default.
- Upload a file. Useful when you’re repurposing a finished report or a Word doc into slides.
- Describe a topic. A one-line prompt that asks the tool to invent the structure. Fast, and the weakest of the three, because the model has nothing concrete to work from.
If you’d rather see the whole feature set laid out before you spend an afternoon on it, there’s a detailed SlidesAI review of the text-to-Slides generation flow that goes deeper on output quality and settings than a walkthrough can.
Shape the input before you hit generate
This step decides whether you get a usable draft or a pile of paragraph-shaped slides. SlidesAI reads structure. Headings become slide titles, short lines become bullets, and a 300-word block of prose becomes a 300-word slide.
Here’s a real before-and-after from that client deck.
Before: “Onboarding has historically relied on a single 90-minute session delivered by the account manager, which works for smaller accounts but has proven difficult to scale across the enterprise tier, where three of our last five renewals slipped past the 60-day mark because…”
Three clauses in, the point still hasn’t landed. That becomes one slide, and nobody reads it.
After: a heading reading “Why onboarding broke at enterprise scale”, followed by three short lines pulling out the specifics: the 90-minute single session, the three slipped renewals, the 60-day mark. Same information, roughly six times more likely to be read.
One idea per heading
I aim for six to ten headings in a single generation, and I write each one as a claim rather than a label. “Q3 churn” is a label. “Churn doubled after the pricing change” tells the tool where the slide needs to go.
Choose slide count and theme on purpose
Two settings do most of the visible work. The slide-count option roughly doubles or halves the output: my 12-slide draft came back as 19 slides when I nudged it up, which was far too many for a 20-minute session. Run the shorter setting first and add slides only where you actually need them.
Theme matters less than people expect. Pick something plain and neutral. You’re going to restyle the title slide and a divider or two anyway, and that takes two minutes. Fighting a decorative theme across 18 slides takes twenty.
Handle images and data yourself
The generator can pull in AI-created images, stock photos, or leave slides text-only. AI images tend to look generic in a way audiences clock immediately. Stock photos are safer for internal decks. For anything client-facing, text-only output plus two or three images you chose yourself beats twelve mediocre ones.
Numbers are a harder limit. SlidesAI is not a charting tool. If your source contains a table of figures, the tool will turn it into bullets at best, so plan to rebuild those slides manually.
The free tier also caps how much you can generate and how long each input can be, and those ceilings arrive faster than the marketing pages suggest. There’s a breakdown of what SlidesAI’s free plan really covers and where it runs out if you’re trying to plan around it.
The 10-minute editing pass that actually matters
Never present the first generation. You also don’t need to rebuild it. These five fixes cover nearly every deck I’ve made:
- Read the outline view, titles only. If the story doesn’t hold with the body text hidden, the structure is wrong and editing won’t save it. Sharpen the headings and regenerate instead.
- Cut bullets to about 12 words. The generator writes full sentences. You want fragments.
- Merge the near-duplicates. One idea regularly gets split across two slides, so merge them back.
- Replace the generic openers. Anything reading like “Introduction” or “Overview” gets swapped for the actual problem.
- Put the numbers back. Your original wording beats the generator’s paraphrase every time.
A worked example: 800-word case study to nine slides
I took a finished customer case study, about 800 words of flowing narrative, and pasted it in after adding three headings: Context, What We Changed, Results. Nine slides came back.
Four survived untouched: the title slide, the problem, the results, and a pull quote I moved to the end. I merged slides three and four, which both covered the same migration decision. I renamed “Background” to “The 30-day churn problem” so the slide said something. I replaced the closing slide, generated as a generic thank-you, with three specific next steps.
Total time from paste to exported PDF: 18 minutes. The previous version of that deck took a full afternoon, most of it spent staring at a blank slide.
Where a different approach works better
SlidesAI is a text-to-structure tool. It’s strong when your content already exists and you need it converted into slides. It’s weaker when the deck has to carry a visual argument, or when you need real charts, or when the design is brand-critical.
For heavily visual decks, it’s worth comparing how Gamma’s free plan handles layout and design before you settle on one tool. For anything genuinely data-heavy, a spreadsheet plus a chart template is still the honest answer.
A reusable input template
This format works across training decks, sales pitches, and project updates. One heading per slide, six to ten of them, one or two supporting lines underneath each.
- The situation: one line, ideally containing a number.
- What’s at stake: what happens if nothing changes.
- The approach: three headings, one per phase or step.
- Evidence: a result, a quote, a before-and-after.
- What happens next: two or three concrete actions with owners attached.
Paste that skeleton with your content filled in and the output lands close to presentable on the first run.
The last five minutes
Generation is the easy part. What separates a deck that reads well from one that presents well is speaker notes. SlidesAI writes slides, not scripts, so walk through each one and jot two lines about what you’ll actually say out loud. It takes five minutes and it stops you reading your own bullets back to the room.
Rename the file before you share it. “SlidesAI presentation” becomes “Onboarding overhaul, Q3 review”. Then run the slideshow once, alone, before anyone else sees it. You’ll catch the slide where the font breaks and the one where you’ve left six bullets in place of two. That run-through is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that shows.