Create a Presentation From Your Dissertation

A dissertation is built to be read. A talk is heard once, in order, by people who can't flip back a page. Getting from one to the other is mostly about choosing what to leave out, and that's the hardest part when you've spent a year on every page.

PPTX.ai can do the first pass. Give it your dissertation as a PDF and tell it what the talk is for. It writes slides that follow your argument, which you can then cut, reorder and reword until they sound like you.

An example

We used "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", the Stanford paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page that introduced Google. It's long, technical and full of numbers: much like a dissertation.

In the studio, we named the presentation, opened Start from a PDF, and attached the paper with:

• Slides: 10
• Quiz questions: 0
• Polls: 0
• Focus: "A 15-minute talk for a general computer science audience. Lead with the problem, then PageRank and why it matters, then the results."

The focus does most of the work. Without it you get a summary of the paper. With it you get a talk with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Shape it into your talk

The first draft is a starting point. A few things worth doing next:

• Cut. If a slide isn't something you'd say out loud, delete it. Ask the assistant to "merge slides four and five", or open a slide and edit it yourself. Editing doesn't use any credits.
• Give the big numbers their own slide. The Big number layout puts one figure on the slide with a line under it saying what it means. Results you want the room to remember belong there.
• Compare side by side. The Two columns layout suits "before and after" or "our method and the baseline".
• Use section breaks. They tell the room where they are in the talk: problem, method, results, what's next.
• Write your speaker notes. Each slide has a notes box that only you see while you present. Put the detail you can't fit on the slide there, along with the numbers you'll want if someone asks.

Then describe the look you want, such as "clean and academic, navy and white, a serif for the headings." The whole talk changes together.

If your audience can take part

A thesis defence isn't the place for a poll. A lab meeting, a seminar or a class presentation might be. Ask the room to guess a result before you show it ("How much faster do you think it was?") and the reveal lands harder. Ask the assistant to "add a poll before the results slide", and your audience answers on their phones.

Good to know

• Generating from a PDF costs 10 credits, and the PDF can be up to 20 MB. For a very long dissertation, a few chapters give a more focused talk than the whole thing.
• PPTX.ai doesn't make PowerPoint files. You build the talk and present it from your browser. If your department needs a .pptx file, see how PPTX.ai compares with PowerPoint.
• More on the options: turning a PDF into a presentation.

Open the studio and start from your dissertation.

We updated this post in October 2026 for the current version of PPTX.ai.