Everything you need to build a deck in Lumen

What Lumen is

Lumen turns a topic or a planned outline — grounded, if you like, in web pages and files you provide — into a slide deck. Each slide gets a layout suited to what it has to say. You then edit the deck directly or with AI, restyle it with any of 34 themes, present it with speaker notes and a timer, and download it as PowerPoint, PDF, HTML or images.

Your Lumen workspace

Everything you make in Lumen — decks and stories — is listed in one workspace, with search. Create in Lumen at the top offers Make Slides and Visual Story. Below it, Start in Lumen has shortcuts for common decks: an executive update, a consulting strategy, a fundraising pitch and a visual story.

Making slides from a topic

1. TopicAnswer What should your slides be about? — for example, a company update or a product launch plan.
2. OptionsAudience & goal; Slides: 12 for a quick proof, 20 concise, 30 standard (the default) or 40 in-depth; Language; and Deck Workflow. Decks in other languages are written in English first, then translated.
3. Make SlidesLumen shows stages and an estimated duration as it works. The estimate is guidance, not a measured completion time; source processing, images and service load can change it. After the job is accepted, you can leave the quick-create page and return to its progress; an early preview fills in as slides are finished.
4. Open SlidesWhen Your Slides Are Ready! appears, open the deck in the editor.

Planning an outline first

Enter the topic, language, approximate deck length (5, 12, 20, 30 or 40 slides), workflow and any extra instructions. Under Source Material, import public web pages by URL or upload up to five files at a time. The general upload limit is 500 MiB per file; DOCX, XLSX, XLS and PPTX files are limited to 64 MiB. Extraction and transcription have additional processing limits and can use a plan’s daily allowance. Research Controls set how sources are used: Auto chooses based on the material, Reference only disables web browsing, and Allow web browsing permits additional context while keeping uploaded material authoritative. The outline itself is planned without web search. Balanced, High-trust only and Primary-only filter web sources; they do not certify that a source or generated claim is true. Image-source choices are separate from the text research policy. Click Plan 3 Layout-Aware Options, choose and edit an outline, then Generate Presentation. The selected count is a target: source-based content and cleanup can produce a shorter deck. Review the sequence, figures and cited passages before presenting.

Eight deck workflows

The workflow you pick shapes both the story the deck tells and the slides Lumen chooses.

Themes and layouts

Lumen has 34 themes and 26 selectable slide layouts. It chooses a layout for each slide from what that slide has to say: a comparison gets a comparison layout, a key number gets a big-number layout. The layouts include timelines, process flows, charts, tables, roadmaps, matrices, dashboards, team slides and FAQs. Change the theme at any point and every slide restyles without rebuilding the deck.

Presenting

Present opens full screen. Press N for speaker notes, T for the timer, Ctrl+K (or ⌘K) to jump to any slide and Esc to exit. Open audience window (second screen) gives the room a slide-only window in the same browser that follows your current slide while you keep your notes. The in-app presenter uses a server connection; keep it connected and use a downloaded file if you need to present offline.

What “hybrid” PowerPoint export means

Slides with a supported layout come out as native, editable text and shapes. Complex slides come out as images so they keep their design. PDF uses the themed rendering, so it is a useful visual handoff. Review its pages before sending, especially fonts, images and line wrapping. PowerPoint export supports every language in the language picker; review fonts and line wrapping on the recipient’s computer, or use PDF, HTML and images for a visual handoff.

Stanza: stories that scroll

A deck is a sequence of fixed frames. A Stanza story is a responsive web page that someone scrolls, and it reflows cleanly on a phone. It lives in the same workspace, with its own editor and present mode.

Editing a story

During first generation, a scene preview may appear while images finish. It remains unfinished: editing, downloading, sharing and conversion stay unavailable. A failed/refunded run restores the placeholder. During regeneration, the earlier completed story remains available until the replacement succeeds.

• Write and Design & preview modes. Stanza autosaves a couple of seconds after you stop typing, so work is not riding on you remembering to click anything. Save is still there when you want a deliberate checkpoint, undo and redo cover the steps in between, and it warns you before you leave with anything unsaved. If the same story is edited in two places, the editor detects the clash rather than silently overwriting one side.
• Chart types. Bar, Line and Donut are currently authorable. Horizontal Bar, Stacked Bar, Area, Pie and Funnel can be read and rendered when present; the five additions are not generally selectable/generated chart types in this rollout.
• Each scene has a capacity budget. It reads Fits, Getting full or Needs another scene. When a scene is overfull, use Continue on new scene rather than cramming, and preview the result at the reading size your audience will use. The budget is guidance for deciding when to split the content, not a promise that every scene will fit every screen.
• There are two kinds of image. An image block sits in the flow of a scene: pick a story image, upload your own image or paste a direct URL, then add alt text (required) and a caption. A section background sits behind the content: set Background to Media to select or upload an image. The Story assets panel also accepts uploads you can reuse across scenes.
• Ask Stanza proposes supported text changes for the current scene or across the story. Review the proposals, select the scenes to change and apply them. It does not change scene structure, IDs, URLs, numeric metric/chart data, quotation attribution or presenter notes. For a story that retains its creation inputs, Regenerate runs those saved inputs again. Review the rewritten story before using it.
• Story history lets you inspect saved revisions and restore one. Save any current edits first. Duplicate creates a separate copy, so you can develop a different direction without replacing the original story.
• Use my brand colours in the Theme panel opens six swatches: primary, accent, page, cards, text and secondary text. Anything you leave unset keeps the theme's own colour. If text and background end up too close to read, the panel shows the contrast ratio.

Presenting and converting

A story presents full screen. Scenes lists every scene so you can jump straight to one, and Notes shows your presenter notes, which never appear in the story itself, in the HTML or PDF download, or in a shared link — both PowerPoint downloads do carry them, in PowerPoint’s own notes pane. The Notes button appears once a scene has notes. From the story viewer, Create editable Lumen deck turns a story into a deck; from a deck, Expand into a Visual Story goes the other way. Stories download as HTML, PDF or PowerPoint on every tier, including after a trial or plan ends — retrieval is never the paid wall. What gates a download is share permission: owners and View & Download collaborators may take a copy, a View only collaborator gets a 403.

Quick links