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Turn a PDF into a presentation outline

Upload one to five PDFs and get a slide-by-slide outline with sourced bullets and speaker notes, ready to paste into your slide software.

Drop your PDFs here

or paste with Ctrl/⌘+V

Uses AI (OpenAI, not used for training). 5 free AI credits without an account, 20 a month on the free plan.

PDF · up to 25 MB

Try it 5× without an account. A free account includes 20 AI credits a month. See plans

What it does

PDF to presentation, explained

PDF to presentation reads one to five PDFs and writes a slide outline: a deck title and 6–12 slides, the first giving an overview. Each slide has a title, two to five short bullets and two to four sentences of speaker notes. Every bullet lists the sources behind it — document, version, page and a quote checked against that page — and bullets with no verified source are flagged. It costs 4 AI credits.

Read more

Be clear about what you get: an outline on screen and a PDF with one section per slide, the speaker notes and a Sources page. It is not a designed PowerPoint or Keynote file. Copy the slide titles, bullets and notes into your own template, which keeps your branding and lets you add charts and images.

If you want every PDF page turned into a PowerPoint slide as it looks, use PDF to PowerPoint instead; that conversion keeps the layout and doesn't summarize. If you want prose rather than slides, PDF to brief writes a cited report from the same documents.

The text is processed by OpenAI's API under OpenAI's API data-usage terms, which by default exclude API data from training.

How to do it

Turn a PDF into a presentation outline in 5 steps

  1. 1Your PDF

  2. 2Pick the format

  3. 3Sections that cite pages

  1. 1

    Sign in and upload

    Drop one to five PDFs, such as a report, its appendix and last quarter's numbers. A free account keeps the outline and its sources. The Free plan includes 20 AI credits a month and Pro includes 500.

  2. 2

    Keep “Slide outline” selected

    Add a focus if the talk has an angle, for example “risks and next steps for the board” or “findings for a non-technical audience”.

  3. 3

    Generate

    Uses 4 AI credits. Long documents are read in parts first, so it can take a minute.

  4. 4

    Check flagged bullets

    Bullets marked as having no verified source need checking or removing before you present them.

  5. 5

    Build the deck

    Download the PDF, or copy titles, bullets and speaker notes into PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides.

Example

Before and after

Before

A 48-page annual sustainability report that needs to become a 10-minute talk for the leadership team.

After

A nine-slide outline — overview, emissions by scope, targets, progress, supplier program, risks, next steps — each bullet citing the report page it came from, with speaker notes per slide and one bullet flagged as unsourced.

Settings & formats

What you can control

Focus
Audience or angle in your own words; the outline concentrates on those topics.
Speaker notes
Two to four plain sentences per slide, written from the same sources.
Several documents
Up to 5 PDFs here; more in a document workspace.

Input

PDF

Output

On-screen slide outline with sources per bulletPDF with one section per slide and a Sources page

Good to know before you start

  • The output is a text outline and a PDF. There is no .pptx export, no slide design, no images and no charts.
  • Charts, tables shown as images and diagrams in the PDF aren't read, so numbers that appear only in a chart won't make it into the outline.
  • Bullets are short by design (about 20 words); detail and nuance are left out. Check anything you'll state in front of an audience.
  • Scanned PDFs need OCR first so there is text to read.
  • Each document is read up to 100 pages on Free and 600 on Pro; pages beyond that, and scanned pages without a text layer, are listed as not read.
If something goes wrong
A bullet says “no verified source”
The AI couldn't tie it to an exact quote on a page. Check the claim yourself or drop it from the deck.
The outline ignores a part I need
Add a focus naming that part, or generate again from just the document that covers it.

PDF to presentation: questions people ask

Does it make a PowerPoint file?

No. It writes the content of a presentation — slide titles, bullets and speaker notes — and gives you a PDF of that outline. Paste it into your own template in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides.

How is this different from PDF to PowerPoint?

PDF to PowerPoint converts every page into a slide that looks like the page, without summarizing. PDF to presentation reads the document and writes a new, shorter talk about it, with sources for every bullet.

How many slides do I get?

Between 6 and 12, depending on how much the documents cover. The first slide is an overview.

Can I check where each bullet came from?

Yes. Each bullet lists its citations: the document, version and page, with a quote checked word for word against that page.

Can I make one presentation from several PDFs?

Yes. Upload up to 5 here, or collect more in a document workspace and choose which ones to include.

How much does it cost?

4 AI credits per outline. The Free plan includes 20 AI credits a month and Pro includes 500.

Is my document used to train AI?

The text is processed by OpenAI's API under OpenAI's API data-usage terms, which by default exclude API data from training. PDFBetter does not train models on your documents.

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