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: 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 each stage as it works, with a time estimate: about 4–6 minutes for 20 slides, 5–8 for 30 and 6–10 for 40. You can leave the page, and 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, deck length (20, 30 or 40 slides), workflow and any extra instructions. Under Source Material, import public web pages by URL or upload documents — text, PDF, audio or video, up to five files at a time and 500 MB each. Research Controls set how sources are used (Auto, Reference only, or Allow web browsing) and how strict the evidence should be (Balanced, High-trust only, or Primary-only). Click Plan 3 Layout-Aware Options, choose and edit an outline, then Generate Presentation.

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 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 to jump to any slide and Esc to exit. Open audience window (second screen) gives the room a clean view that follows your current slide while you keep your notes.

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 reproduces the theme layout exactly, so use it when the look matters more than editing. For some languages PowerPoint isn't available, but PDF, HTML and images still work.

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

• Write and Design & preview modes. Stanza saves when you click Save, and it warns you before you leave with unsaved changes.
• 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, because that budget is what keeps stories readable on a phone.
• There are two kinds of image. An image block sits in the flow of a scene: pick one of the story's images or paste a direct URL, and add alt text (required) and a caption. A section background sits behind the content: set Background to Media and choose an image. There's no upload button in the story editor; images come from generation or a pasted URL.
• 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, an export or a shared link. 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 while your Lumen trial or plan is active.