Creating Professional Slide Decks with Gamma

Hey, guys, I wanted to give you a little bit of a demonstration of how to use Gamma and the AI that's embedded in it to produce professional quality slide decks.

I've been using Keynote for years, as I said in the newsletter, but I, don't think I'll ever go back because Gamma makes it so much easier and has design options that frankly would probably take me days to do it.

I'm not really a designer, but, but I kind of act like a designer and for the most part I can design my own slide decks.

But let me just show you how easy this is.

Now I'm, going to go here to ChatGPT, where I created, and I'm not going to show you all my iteration, but I basically created a presentation that I wanted to give to some financial advisors about how to create a succession plan and how to build a business that runs without their constant involvement.

So I finally got the talking points the way I wanted, and then I said, can you create a slide deck?

Can you please go ahead and turn this into slides?

And then I asked it to reduce the slide numbers and so there's the presentation.

Now, if you know anything about ChatGPT, this is a canvas, so if you're using Claude, it would be an artifact.

But regardless, all I have to do is click on this copy button here, copy to the clipboard, and then I'm going to go over here to Gamma.

now this is what it looks like when you log in.

It has your previous presentations, and I've got this selected to my recently viewed ones.

There's others in here.

But, and what I suggested in the news article is that you want to go into your themes and you'll want to create a theme.

You don't have to do this, but it certainly makes it easier if you want to maintain brand consistency.

And if you plan on presenting a lot of, presentations like I do, I usually have two or three a week.

So I can come in here and this is my full focus theme.

I've got one for the AI Business Lab as well.

But, here you can specify your colors and then you can go here and specify the fonts that you want to use.

And it's giving you a preview over here to show you what it's going to look like when it's actually fully rendered.

Then you can put your logo, that's my company logo design.

You can get really detailed here and really kind of nitpicky, which, frankly, as a, wannabe designer I like to do.

So you can get come down here to your buttons and you can adjust those and all of that stuff.

Let's say I want to make a little bit more rounded corner.

I'm not actually sure where you do that but anyway you get the idea.

These are how I like the images.

And then I.

Oh, there's the button.

That's where I was adjusting it.

So I do it there.

It makes it a little less pronounced.

They're a little bit more pronounced.

So then I come down to my images and I can have some additional style prompts.

Don't have to do this.

Totally optional but again I'm pretty finicky so I get it the way I want it.

And then I would save the theme.

Okay, so let's create a new presentation from the get go.

So we'll go back to Gamma Gammas and we're going to do create new and we're going to use AI to do it.

Now we immediately have several options.

We can just paste in the text which is what we're going to do.

We could generate it from a one line prompt and actually work on the text for the presentation right from within Gamma.

But I like pretty much Claude for the most part.

But as you saw I did use ChatGPT for this one.

And then you can import it from like if you have already a PowerPoint deck or a Word doc, a PDF, Google Docs, Google Slides import from URL.

But I'm going to just copy and paste because I created the content in ChatGPT so I'm going to paste it in there like that.

And one of the things I'm going to change about this, I want to have this actually is my title so I'm not going to make that italics and it's not going to pay much attention to this anyway.

But I do want to have my name in here.

Okay.

Whoops.

I'm using type expander for this.

There we go.

And I'm going to want that all caps.

Okay.

So I scroll down here, make sure the slides are all what I want.

This is the copy that's going to go on the slides.

Now if I say preserve this exact text it will preserve this exact text and not improvise or add anything.

But I've been actually delighted when I select this one generate from notes on a slide and it's going to give it some wiggle room to kind of create and invent and innovate.

So now it's configuring the prompt and I want minimal amount of text.

So I'm going to generate it, but I want a minimal amount of text because I hate slides that are too busy, at least for formal presentation.

If I'm presenting a slide deck to investors and we're not looking at it on a screen, but they're actually taking it away as a document, then I might go something like detailed or extensive or one of these other ones write for.

And I can fill this in.

But it pulled this from the slide copy.

It inferred this.

The AI did go down here under visuals.

I'm going to use the full focus theme, the image art style.

I want.

I want illustrations.

And this is very important format.

It defaults to basically fluid, which means the slide will adjust in size based on the content.

I don't want that.

I want it to always be 16 by 9, which is a traditional slide size and will fit on the projector.

Okay, so I'm going to pick down here traditional 16 by 9.

Now I'm going to start generating.

So watch this.

Okay, so now it's starting to build the slides one at a time.

And I can already see things that I want to adjust.

It's generating all the illustrations in the background, But it's just building these over here.

You can see it's on slide 8.

Now it's going to slide 9, slide 10, Slide 12.

Remember, it's going to do 14, I think.

No, it's going to do 12.

Okay, great.

Now, one of the things I see that I already don't like, I don't like straight quotes.

So I want to have curly quotes and curly apostrophes.

Like there's a straight apostrophe.

That's not really how it's done in the publishing world.

And I want the proper typographic marks.

So I go up here to agent and think of this as like an AI designer that's inside the computer that's going to do your bidding.

So here's what I'm going to tell it.

Please convert all the straight apostrophes and straight quote marks to curly apostrophes and quote marks.

Okay, I just dictated that in there.

And imagine just telling a designer to go back through and do that.

And if you did this manually, you could certainly do it, but it would probably take you five minutes to do it.

And this is going to do it pretty quickly.

It's already done it.

Okay, if I scroll back to the top, I'm going to see.

Let's see here.

There was one.

So there.

There it is.

Okay, so there's some things I like, some things I don't like.

First of all, this looks like it repeated the slide.

So let's just kill this slide up here.

It's the least like what I want.

So I'm going to go up here and just click on these three dots here and click the trash can.

Boom.

Gone.

Now this is intended to be what's called in the publishing world an eyebrow or a lead in to the main title.

But this down here, building a business that outlives you is actually the title.

So what I'm going to do here is click on the dots again which highlights that text.

And I can put many different sizes in here, but I'm going to pick let's try heading two.

Then I'm gonna go to this block of text and I'm gonna say I want that actually to be display size.

Okay, this looks great.

I wanna make this a little bit larger.

So I'm gonna call that large text.

And then I'm gonna do something that I can't adjust the character spacing in gamma, which is kind of frustrating.

But I can put a space and I have to do this in Google Docs too, so I'm used to it.

I sometimes like that larger spacing and I think that looks nice except that I want there to be more vertical space between the title and my name.

So I'm just going to highlight both and then I'm going to tell the agent, please add more vertical, space between these two text blocks.

I'm going to hit return and let's see if it can do it.

Okay, you did it.

I think that looks pretty nice.

So I'm ready to move on now.

One thing, if I didn't like this illustration here, I could actually change it.

And so I could come down here to ask AI.

So I could remove the background, I could vectorize it, I could animate it.

I'll show you some of that in just a minute.

Or I could completely regenerate it all together.

So if I put edit image and I could say enhance the problem I want, but then I could go ahead and completely regenerate a different image.

In fact, let's just try that for the fun of it, see what it produces.

Okay, don't like that better.

I kind of think I like the original image.

So I'm going to stick with that second scroll down here.

The 90 day test.

Now I want this to be big because this is kind of a big idea.

I'm not sure that's probably big enough right there.

And then I'm going to Go back here to.

I think heading one is probably pretty good, but I definitely want this text bigger.

And so I'm going to just say down here, make the text in these two boxes bigger.

So it's still going to take you some time.

The difference is this ain't going to take me all day.

I'm going to be able to knock this out in probably less than 30 minutes.

Okay.

So I still want these headings bigger.

And I'm really fiddly when it comes to text.

So if I highlight the text, I can change this.

And I'm going to put it up to heading two so it's a little bit bigger.

But watch this.

I could actually change the way this looks.

I could make these side by side like that, which I think is actually a better way to display this, don't you?

Okay.

So I'm pretty happy with that.

The central truth, every financial advisor can build a business that outlives them, by installing five interconnected succession systems that create institutional strength.

Okay.

Now maybe I don't really like this particular way it's depicted, so I can change the layout.

Watch what happens over here.

All kinds of layouts.

Right.

So I could say, actually I just wanted a simple box like that.

However, I'm going to highlight this.

Maybe it's just three dots.

And I'm going to change this text.

Oops.

So that this is.

Let's call this heading two.

And let's see if I can change this separately.

And I may not be able to sort.

I really want.

That is just this large text.

Yeah.

So I could do it.

And I frankly like this.

Left justified.

So completely different way of styling things in keynote.

But this would take forever in keynote because everything has to be adjusted individually.

And so I think I like how that looks right now.

Okay, Go down here.

Now, personally, in a presentation, I don't like the advice and you've probably heard it before.

Tell them what you're going to tell them.

Tell them.

Tell them what you told them.

I don't like.

Tell them what you're going to tell them.

Because what that does is it breaks the tension in the presentation.

I want them guessing or wondering.

So I do like this part that basically there's five interconnected succession systems.

I'm just not going to tell them where they're at.

I'm going to keep this to myself.

So I'm going to come up here and I'm going to kill that slide.

And now we're going to go next to the vision system.

So I'd Keep adjusting.

And I'm not going to show you all the details of doing this other than to show you one little cool feature.

And I haven't tried it here, but let's just try it where if I want to adjust this image, I can say animate this.

And this is kind of a cool effect when it happens.

So this is going to take a minute.

This doesn't always work the way that you want it.

I want to keep the animations.

Pretty few.

I don't want to do too many.

In fact, in the final presentation, which I'm about to show you, I only have two animations.

And part of that is because the animations will loop like a gif, and I find that distracting.

But you can see the animations here.

Is that useful?

I don't know.

Maybe not.

Maybe I'll just keep the original.

Okay, now I want to show you what the final presentation after I tweaked it, and I swear this took me 40 minutes to do it.

This presentation.

By the way, notice the animation of the sun coming up.

This animation, or, this whole deck would have taken me at least a day, probably two days in Keynote, because I'd have to generate each one of these slides or each one of these illustrations independently.

Then I'd have to add it to Keynote because Keynote has no built in, AI.

But I went through and adjusted all these elements just like I would like them.

And I'm just going to show you all the different options.

And anytime you get to one of these, you've got an option of changing the layout.

And if you click over here, I think that does the same thing is the layout.

But you could adjust the kinds of boxes.

This is so I could do top circle boxes, which I think actually let me do the labeled ones.

Yeah.

So that's giving me a numbered list here.

But you can just play around here until you get it just like you want it.

That's what I really like.

And so you can see I've adjusted all these slides.

Now, when you get it the way you want it, by the way, I got to show you, that's one animation that I think did work because I'm trying to convince people, business owners, financial advisors in particular, that they can generate a revenue system that continually generates the cash they need to, to run their life and their business.

Now, once I get it the way I want it and I'm happy with the whole thing, I can present it or I can publish it.

And this one has been published to the web so that I can kind of offer my audience a leave behind of this artifact where they can go to a link that I give them and have the entire presentation at their disposal.

But I could also present it.

And so if it hasn't been published it'll tell you you can present it.

But you can also click up here on these buttons and then click present.

And let's hope this gets captured.

It does.

Now notice what happens when I move from slide to slide.

First there's the animation of the sun but it has this parallax effect where the text kind of moves at a place like you've seen this on websites before but all of that can be adjusted like you want but everything just kind of scrolls into place.

Beautiful presentation, beautiful typography and 40 minutes versus two days of my time.

I think it's a pretty good trade off.

What do you think?

Let me know in the comments.