The report runs to twelve pages. It was written over the summer by the parish council’s footpaths working group, it has four appendices and a map that prints slightly off-centre, and on page seven there is a costed list of every stile, gate and fingerpost that needs replacing in the parish. On Tuesday evening, someone has to stand up in the village hall and present it to forty residents, half of whom have come to talk about one gate.
That someone rarely has a free afternoon to build slides. What they do have is the document, and a document is most of a presentation already. The trick is getting the useful parts out of it and onto screens that people at the back of a hall can read.
The examples below use Quillbot’s AI Presentation Maker, which takes a Word file or PDF directly, so nobody has to copy and paste a report into slides page by page.
The documents people actually have
Hardly anybody starts with a blank page. They start with something they or a colleague already wrote, usually for reading rather than presenting. A few common cases:
- A council or committee report. Like the footpaths report above: long, careful, full of figures, written to be read at home before the meeting.
- A training manual. A 40-page staff handbook for a café or a care home, of which a new starter needs perhaps six pages on their first morning.
- A dissertation chapter. A student presenting a methodology chapter to a supervisor or a small seminar group, with 8,000 words to squeeze into ten minutes.
- A business plan. A sole trader taking a plan to a bank, an enterprise agency or a potential partner, where the person across the desk wants the numbers and the risks, and not much else.
Each one needs cutting differently, which is where most of the work is.
Prepare the document before you upload anything
An AI tool will summarise whatever you give it. Give it twelve pages and it will try to represent all twelve, appendices included, and the result will feel thin everywhere. So decide three things first.
Who is in the room. Residents at a parish meeting want to know what is happening near their house and what it will cost them. Councillors want the decisions. A bank manager wants cash flow. Write the audience down in a sentence, because it goes straight into the prompt.
How many slides. A rough rule is one slide per minute of speaking, minus a couple for questions. A ten-minute slot gets eight to ten slides.
Which pages matter. Make a copy of the document and delete everything that doesn’t serve that audience. For the footpaths report, that meant cutting the working group’s terms of reference, the meeting minutes in Appendix B and the historical note about the old drovers’ road (lovely, but not for Tuesday). What survived was about four pages: the summary, the costed list, the map and the recommendations. Save that trimmed copy as a new Word file or PDF.
The dissertation chapter needs a different kind of cut. A student presenting a methodology chapter to a seminar group doesn’t need the literature review that justified every choice; the group wants the research question, what was done, why, and what went wrong. Keep the one table of participants, the description of the method and the limitations section, and leave the rest in the chapter where your supervisor can find it. Keeping the trimmed file is useful later too, because next term’s presentation probably starts from the same pages.
The steps in Quillbot
Quillbot’s ai presentation maker is labelled Beta on its page and is free to use, with a Premium plan that adds unlimited presentations, faster generation and access to all of Quillbot’s tools. The process has four stages.
1. Attach the file. Use the Attach Files option. It accepts PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx) and images (PNG, JPG, JPEG and WebP). It does not accept Excel spreadsheets, so if your figures live in a spreadsheet, either paste the important ones into the prompt as plain text or save the sheet as a PDF and attach that. An older .doc file from a previous decade of Word needs re-saving as .docx first.
2. Write the prompt. This is where you tell the tool what the document can’t: who the audience is, what tone to take and which points matter most. A good prompt is a short paragraph, not a single line.
3. Set the slide count. There’s a selector for this. Match it to the number you settled on earlier.
4. Generate, then choose a design. The tool produces slide titles and speaker-ready text drawn from your document, then offers AI-generated layouts, themes and design options to pick from. Choose plain over clever. A village hall projector washes out pale colours, so a dark text on a light background with strong contrast is safer than anything fashionable.
Here is the prompt used for the footpaths report:
Create a 9-slide presentation from the attached report for a public parish meeting in a village hall. Audience: about forty local residents, not specialists, many of them walkers and dog owners. Tone: plain, friendly, factual. Lead with what is changing and where, then the cost and how it is funded, then what residents can do. Use the costed list on page 3 for one slide only, grouping items by type (stiles, gates, fingerposts) rather than listing all of them. Include the map as an image. Finish with a slide on how to send comments to the clerk before 30 November.
Notice what that prompt does. It names the audience, sets the order, and tells the tool which section to compress.
The editing pass
Expect to spend longer here than on everything else combined, and expect that to be time well spent. In the editor you can change section titles and content, reorder sections, delete them or add new ones. You can also crop images, remove image backgrounds and apply filters, and the tool can suggest or generate charts, graphs and images.
Go through every slide with three questions. Is everything on it true to the document? Could someone at the back read it? Does it say one thing?
The first question matters most. A summarising tool sometimes smooths a careful sentence into a confident one, and “the working group recommends, subject to funding” can come out as “the parish will replace”. Put the qualifier back.
Crop the map so the relevant footpaths fill the frame, and delete any slide that only repeats the previous one in different words.
A paragraph from the report, and the slide it became
The original, from page 5 of the footpaths report:
Following the condition survey undertaken in July, the working group has identified fourteen stiles which no longer meet accessibility expectations and which present a particular difficulty for older residents and those walking with dogs. It is recommended that, subject to the outcome of the county council’s Rights of Way improvement grant application, these be replaced with kissing gates or, where livestock considerations allow, with gaps, at an estimated total cost of £9,800, of which the parish would be expected to contribute approximately 25 per cent.
The slide, after generation and a light edit:
Fourteen stiles to become gates Surveyed in July: 14 stiles are hard to cross, especially for older walkers and dogs Plan: kissing gates, or open gaps where there’s no livestock Estimated cost: £9,800 Parish share: about 25% (roughly £2,450), if the county grant is approved
Sixty-odd words became about forty, and the condition (“if the county grant is approved”) survived, because it was checked for. The speaker can say the rest out loud.
How much to cut, by document type
| Document type | Recommended slide count | What to cut first |
|---|---|---|
| 12-page council or committee report | 8 to 10 | Terms of reference, minutes, background history |
| Staff training manual | 10 to 12 per session | Policies new starters sign separately, rarely used procedures |
| Dissertation chapter | 10 to 12 | Literature already covered in earlier chapters, long quotations |
| Business plan | 10 to 14 | Company history, generic market description, appendices of CVs |
These are starting points. A training manual is better split into several short decks, one per session, than forced into one long one.
Exporting, sharing and the Google Slides workaround
When the slides are right, export. Quillbot offers PPTX, PDF in standard or print versions, PNG, JPG and GIF.
- PPTX if you’ll present from PowerPoint or want to add anything the tool doesn’t include. It has no automatic animations, no slide transitions and no speaker notes, so if you want notes to read from on the night, export PPTX and type them into PowerPoint’s notes panel.
- PDF (standard) for presenting from someone else’s laptop, or for emailing to people who weren’t there. It looks the same on every machine.
- PDF (print) for handouts. Parish meetings still run on paper, and a printed copy on each chair saves a lot of squinting.
- PNG or JPG for single slides, say the map slide for the parish newsletter or a noticeboard.
Google Slides export isn’t built in yet; the page lists it as coming soon. In the meantime, export PPTX, upload the file to Google Drive and open it with Google Slides. Check it slide by slide afterwards, since fonts and spacing can shift in the conversion.
You can also share a link or invite people by email to collaborate in real time. That suits a committee: the clerk can correct a date and the chair can tweak a title without anyone emailing files back and forth called “final”, “final2” and “final USE THIS ONE”.
When something goes wrong
The fonts have changed when you open it in PowerPoint. This usually means the theme uses a font that isn’t installed on the computer you’re using, so PowerPoint substitutes another one and your text spills out of its boxes. In PowerPoint on Windows, go to the Home tab, open the Replace drop-down and choose Replace Fonts to swap the missing font for one you have, such as Calibri or Arial. Then check every slide for overflowing text. If you’re presenting on an unfamiliar machine, the PDF avoids the problem entirely.
A chart shows numbers you never gave it. Because the tool can suggest and generate charts, it will sometimes produce one that looks plausible but uses figures that aren’t in your document, or that rounds yours into something different. Delete it. Then either put the real figures in your prompt and regenerate that slide, or make the chart yourself in a spreadsheet, save it as an image and attach it. Never present a chart you haven’t checked against the source, line by line.
A 30-page PDF has produced a vague, general deck. The tool tried to represent all thirty pages in ten slides and ended up saying very little about any of them. Go back to the trimming stage. Either cut the PDF down to the five or six pages that matter, or split it by section and generate a short deck for each, then combine them in PowerPoint. Scanned PDFs (photographs of pages rather than real text) can also cause trouble, and are worth retyping or re-exporting from the original file if you still have it.
Mistakes to avoid
Uploading the whole document unread. You’ll get a deck about everything and nothing.
Leaving the slide count on whatever it was last time. Check it every time.
Trusting the summary. Read each slide against the source, especially anything with a figure, a date or a “subject to”.
Too much text. If a slide has more than five lines, split it or cut it. The detail belongs in what you say, or in the printed report.
Forgetting the last slide. Tell people what happens next and how to respond. For the parish meeting, that was the clerk’s email address and the 30 November deadline, in large type.
Common questions
Can I upload a PowerPoint and have it redesigned? Yes, .pptx is one of the accepted file types, so you can attach an old presentation and ask for a new version with a different structure or fewer slides.
Will it keep my document’s images? It can use images from your files, and you can attach extra image files alongside the document. Check that the right picture landed on the right slide, and crop as needed.
What about a document that isn’t in English? Write the prompt in the language you want the slides in and check the output carefully, as you would any translation. Have a fluent speaker read it before you present.
Does it add speaker notes? No. It produces speaker-ready text on the slides themselves, but notes need adding in PowerPoint after exporting a PPTX.
Tuesday evening
Before you open any software, print the document, take a pen to it and cross out every page your audience doesn’t need. Then attach what’s left to Quillbot’s ai presentation maker, write a five-sentence prompt, and spend the time you’ve saved reading the slides against the source. Bring printed copies of the map. Someone will want to point at their gate.
