Presented by
How to generate client-ready presentations in PDF Spaces in less than ten minutes with Adobe Acrobat
AI tools are helping to take a lot of the grunt work out of our day-to-day jobs, picking up time-consuming tasks so that we can get on with the interesting stuff. Thanks to PDF Spaces, repurposing existing content into a client-ready presentation is one such task that can now be ticked off your to-do list in a matter of minutes. Here’s how it works.
About PDF Spaces
Adobe describes PDF spaces as a way to “bring your files into one smart workspace to generate insights, audio overviews, and new content.” One space lets you pull together multiple linked documents into an intuitive and streamlined workflow, with an AI-assistant that can summarize key points, find themes and get organized. Beyond that, it can also produce content based on the documents you provide.
What you’ll need
Before getting started, you’ll need an Adobe Acrobat Pro account, with access to the PEF Spaces. We made use of an Acrobat AI Assistant Plus free trial for this guide.
You’ll also need to gather your relevant documents and other materials. Beyond PDFs, this could include web links and other Office documents such as Word, PowerPoint or Excel files.
As with all AI-powered content generation, the results you get will be heavily dependent on the quality of the materials that you plug in. So, to create a polished presentation, it’s worth spending some time making sure you have the right documents and files uploaded before you start.
Getting started
Open up Adobe Acrobat and navigate to PDF Spaces in the left-hand menu. You’ll see a prompt to ‘Get started with a PDF space’ – this is where you can instantly upload your files and create your PDF Space.
Simply drag and drop the files into the window or open up the select files to browse your computer and find the docs you need. Hit ‘Add to PDF Space’ and your workspace will be generated.
The AI-assistant will immediately get to work with some initial tasks, giving you a summary of your files in text and audio. You can open the documents you’ve provided, or scroll to the bottom to add more content.
For our purposes, it’s time to interact with the AI assistant and get a little more specific about what you want it to do. ‘Create a presentation from these files’ appeared as a suggested action in the chat window on the right-hand side.
Generating your presentation
Once you select the option to generate a presentation, or give the AI-assistant your instruction, it has some questions to help customize your output.
Select your audience – options included friends or family, investors, general public, executives /senior management and several more to ensure you pull out the right content for your purpose. For this test, we chose clients or customers.
Choose a tone – Adobe offers 13 different tones to choose from, from casual to professional and everything in between. Other options included ‘funny’, ‘friendly’ and empathetic – letting users take control of how their content will be perceived. We went for Clear and Professional.
Set a length – anything from a short and snappy 2-slide overview to 10+ slides of detailed presentation.
Select a template – 17 different templates to choose from, with a range of themes and styles.
Once you’re happy with your settings go ahead and hit Generate presentation so that the AI can get to work. And get to work it does, remarkably quickly. After hitting my timer and sitting back in my chair I barely had time to take a sip of coffee before the first iteration of the presentation was complete.
The timer sat at 1.05, meaning you can get a first draft ready in well under two minutes. Considering the amount of time it would take even a seasoned marketing professional to pull together an initial slide deck, the benefits for time-saving and productivity are immediately obvious.
Customization
Content-wise, the AI-assistant did a great job of pulling out the most relevant points and creating a clear and simple slide deck that could be used to take a potential client through the product. It was well-structured, hit the professional tone we’d asked for, and followed a clear logic with key takeaways at the end. So far so good.
However, being limited to 17 basic templates means that, for a really polished presentation, you will need to do a little customization to get the results you need. The tool comes equipped with a simple editor, so you can change fonts, add logos and apply your brand colours.
If you navigate to the Brands section on the left hand menu, you’ll also find the option to apply your brand to the overall presentation – either by uploading the necessary information or, even easier, uploading a branded document and allowing the AI to extract it for you.
At this stage, you can also swap out images – we found that PDF spaces generated its own thematically relevant images, rather than using images extracted from our PDFs. At this stage, you might prefer to upload your own.
Realistically, this stage of the process might take anywhere from 10-30 minutes, depending on how much you want to fine-tune the content. Even with very minimal input, you can get something that’s ready to go.
Sharing your presentation
Once your content is ready, the final step is to either download the content or present it via the integrated presentation tool. Both options can be found side by side in the top right-hand section of the screen.
If you opt for a download then there are a range of formats available including PowerPoint as well as PDF and PNG, while the presentation mode opens up a simple but efficient interactive slideshow, including the option to use speaker notes if required.
Final tips and tricks
We mentioned it at the start, but the output will only ever be as good as what you put in. Make sure you curate the right set of source documents before you start.
If you want to refine the AI assistant’s output further, remember that you can edit the prompt to give more detail about your requirements, or chat with it after the presentation is created to get the results you need.