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How I Made a Cool Presentation in Minutes With Gamma!
Published May 11, 2025 · 383 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Create a Gamma account for free at gamma.app and organize projects into folders before generating.
- Use the paste-in-text option to turn existing long-form content (a manuscript, an outline from ChatGPT or Claude) into a presentation.
- Choose 'preserve' instead of 'generate' or 'condense' to keep the presentation word-for-word aligned with your original content.
- Select a custom theme that matches your existing brand or book cover before generating.
- Finished presentations can be shared with password gating, exported, embedded, or opened up for team collaboration.
How do you turn an existing document into a presentation with Gamma?
In Gamma, select “create new with Gamma AI” inside a folder, then choose the “paste in text” option and paste in your existing content — a manuscript, an outline, or notes from a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude. Gamma reads that text and generates a full slide deck from it automatically.
What are the three content options when generating a Gamma presentation?
Gamma offers generate, condense, and preserve. Condense tightens the pasted content down to detailed, medium, or brief versions per card. Generate gives Gamma more creative range, including added prompting for audience and tone plus image model selection. Preserve keeps the majority of the original content intact and uses it word-for-word rather than rewriting it.
How was the demo presentation actually built in this video?
The video copies an entire 111-page book manuscript (roughly 33,000 words and 223,000-plus characters) directly into Gamma’s paste-in-text field and generates a presentation from it.
- Open Gamma, create a folder, and select “create new with Gamma AI.”
- Choose “paste in text” and paste in the full manuscript.
- Gamma generates cards up to its limit — in this case, 60 of an estimated 64 cards.
- Select “preserve” so the presentation keeps the book’s original wording rather than rewriting it.
- Choose an image model (pictographic is shown as an example) for illustrations.
- Pick a pre-existing theme, or select a custom theme that matches existing brand colors — here, matching the book cover’s color scheme.
- Click generate and let Gamma build out the full presentation in real time.
How long did it take, and did Gamma stay on topic?
The full 60-slide presentation, generated from the entire book manuscript, took about 15 minutes. The presentation used the book’s content word-for-word rather than drifting off topic, which is called out as the key signal that a large language model or AI tool is staying in context with the source material rather than inventing unrelated content.
What can you do with a finished Gamma presentation?
Once generated, a presentation can be shared with collaborators added to the workspace, shared directly, gated with a password, exported, or embedded elsewhere. The video frames this as one option among several ways to distribute a presentation once it has been built.
Full video transcript
In this video, I’m going to be demonstrating effortless presentation creation using Gamma and how simple and easy it is to get started from existing content. So, if you haven’t already created a Gamma account, you can get started for free at gamma.app. And once you sign in, you can create a folder for different projects under the folder section in your left-hand tab. I recommend starting with folders to organize your projects and selecting create new with Gamma AI.
Now here you’re going to see a few different options to get started: paste in text, generate, and import file. To demonstrate the power of Gamma for the presentation based off existing content, I’m going to take my entire book manuscript for Buyer Brief and select the paste in text option, which is my go-to for creating presentations and landing pages for websites from an existing outline that I’m bringing in from ChatGPT or Claude or any other large language model that you are using to brainstorm and create content from.
I’ll do that by opening up my digital copy of the Buyer’s Brief book manuscript. And as you can see, this is a lot of content — 111 pages worth. I’m going to copy it. Just noting, almost 33,000 words and 223,000-plus characters. Copying all of that right now directly into Gamma. I’m going to have it create a presentation.
So we can see here I’ve hit a limit for the first 60 cards that we generated out of the estimated 64. You have three options here: generate, condense, and preserve. If you select condense, it’ll take the content and tighten it up a bit — you can incorporate detailed, medium, or brief in terms of modifications for the text per card. Generate gives Gamma a little bit more open range; you can add more prompting around who you’re writing it for and the tone. You can also select images in different image models for illustrating. So in this case, I could select something like pictographic here.
Keep the format presentation mode. And if I preserve it, which in this case will preserve the majority of the content, I’m going to keep my illustrations here. On the right-hand side, you can see I have additional instructions I can provide. And though I’ve hit my limit, 60 cards is quite a bit, and you’ll see right now the real-time generation of this as we hit continue.
And once we hit continue, we have the option to select different pre-existing themes here on the right side. We also have an option for custom themes. If we see that over here — now if I wanted to select a custom theme that I’ve made for another project, I can select that right here. Since this does match the cover of the book, I’m going to use it and click generate. By match, I more so mean the color scheme of this book. And we’ll see what Gamma comes up with — its instructions on the image generation as well as the whole book presentation. And recall I did say preserve the content, so we can see it doing that here.
And then reading through this, it’s using word for word the content from the book, which is something you want to keep in mind as you work with any large language model and any AI tool — that it’s keeping the context in line with the outcome that you’re looking for. And if it was going off track and not utilizing the content that I’ve already written in the book, then I would know that Gamma is going in a direction that is not ideal for where I want to be going. But thankfully, Gamma is working like a charm, and we’re off to the races.
Now, at this point in time, you could sit back, relax, and go for a walk or anything else that you’d like to do while you’re not stuck building out a presentation like this — or any presentation the old way in PowerPoint. Now we have Gamma. This is just the first step in leveraging this tool to create better presentations, better websites, better ways to streamline our communication and make it effortless to put our ideas out there in the world in a way that we can better communicate with our communities, with our customers, with our clients, with our co-workers.
So as you’re watching this, in consideration to how much time are you spending putting together presentations — whether it’s PowerPoint, whether it’s Gamma already, whether it’s another AI-powered tool that you’ve tested out before, whether it’s Keynote — assessing the time that you’re taking already in the manual presentation creation, because you’re already needing to do the work, and you’re more than likely already spending the bulk of where you need to be in the process creating the content, the idea behind it, the outline, the data. And of course, you can use AI to assist with all of that.
At the point of getting the data into a Google document, how are you presenting that data in a way that isn’t just simply a Google doc, which in a lot of cases works just fine, but not all cases by any means? And if you have everything organized inside of even just a simple Google doc, you now have the information in the organization. And a book is a great example of that. But you may already have a course, you may already have a product or service that you have all this information and detail and research that you’ve done that you need to present to investors or potential investors or stakeholders or your team or your company or anybody really for that matter.
Gamma is an incredibly powerful and simple and easy to use tool to help with creating these presentations. And there’s a number of different ways that you can share this information. So you can see you can collaborate, you can add people to your workspace, you can share it, you can gate it with passwords, you can export it, and you can embed it. Let us know how you use this tool in your own presentations.
Skipped all the way — very in 60 slides, took about 15 minutes. So much content, keeping the context. That’s pretty cool.