Sometimes the output you need is not a report but a deck — a dozen slides you can put in front of people, with the sources still attached. The deck editor builds one inside LumaVista and hands you a PowerPoint file at the end.

The deck editor is a beta feature and is off by default. Where it is not enabled for your deployment, the Decks entry does not appear in the sidebar and the page is not reachable. To ask for it, contact us.

Starting a deck

Open Decks from the sidebar. The My Decks page lists your decks as cards; the create button makes a new one and drops you straight into the editor.

A new deck starts blank: one title slide, in the standard business style. There is no button today that turns a finished research report into slides for you. You build the deck, and you bring the sources across yourself — the citation tools below are how you keep the deck grounded once you have.

The editor

The editor has four regions:

Top — the deck title, undo and redo, the layout switcher for the current slide, add-slide, the export buttons, and a saving indicator.
Left — the filmstrip. Select a slide, drag to reorder, delete.
Centre — the slide you are editing, with its blocks and its speaker notes.
Bottom — the AI edit bar.

Changes save as you make them. There is no save button, and no separate draft state.

Layouts

Each slide has one layout, chosen from the switcher:

Layout	What it is
Title	The opening slide.
Full-bleed cover	A photo behind the title, with a scrim applied by the theme.
Section	A divider between parts of the deck.
Agenda	Generated from your section slides.
Bullets	A heading and a bulleted list.
Statement	One bold line.
Two columns	Two side-by-side columns.
Stat	A big number and a label.
Closing	The wrap-up or call to action.

The agenda slide carries no content of its own. It reads the deck’s section slides and numbers them, so it cannot go stale when you move, rename or delete a section. That is also why the layout switcher will not let you turn a slide that already has content into an agenda.

A two-column slide has one extra control: the column ratio. Even gives two equal columns, Media major lets the media column dominate, Media minor turns it into a sidebar.

A deck can hold up to 40 slides.

Blocks

Content lives in blocks. Add one from the block menu on the slide:

Block	What it holds
Paragraph	A block of prose.
Bullets	A list, one item per line.
Statistic	A headline number and a caption.
Quote	A pull-quote, with an optional attribution.
Timeline	Dated steps — each with a label, a date and a body.
Table	A comparison table, with an optional header row.
Image	Uploaded or generated.
Diagram	A mermaid, graphviz, d2 or plantuml spec.

The structural limits, which the editor enforces as you type rather than letting the save fail:

12 blocks per slide, and at most 4 statistic blocks on one slide
8 timeline entries per timeline
5 columns and 10 rows per table, counting the header row

What the editor does not do

You cannot position anything by hand. There is no drag-a-box-anywhere canvas, no pixel coordinates, no per-slide font sizes or colour pickers. You choose a layout, you fill its blocks, and the deck’s design decides where everything sits.

This is deliberate. A deck describes what is on each slide, not where the pixels go, which is what lets the same deck render correctly to the on-screen preview, to PDF and to PowerPoint without three sets of layout decisions drifting apart. It also means a slide cannot end up subtly off-brand because someone nudged a text box.

The same reasoning applies to smaller knobs. A full-bleed cover’s darkening scrim comes from the theme, not from a per-slide opacity slider.

Editing with AI

The bar at the bottom of the editor takes an instruction in plain language — “tighten the bullets and add a closing stat” — and applies it. The scope toggle chooses between this slide and the whole deck.

An AI edit produces exactly the same kinds of change the manual controls do, and lands on the same undo stack. If you do not like what it did, undo it like anything else. If the instruction produces nothing actionable, nothing changes.

Images

An image block takes either an upload or a generated image.

Uploads accept PNG, JPEG, WebP and GIF, up to 10 MB per file. Every image is re-encoded on the way in, stored encrypted under your own key, and served back from LumaVista rather than from wherever it came from. Your deck images share a 500 MB allowance.

Generation takes a prompt and an optional style hint. It spends credits — see Pricing for what things cost. Two things to know:

The generate option appears only when the image service is actually reachable, so you are not offered a button that cannot work.
Generation refuses outright if your session is locked, because the result could not be stored. It checks before spending anything.

When an image stops being referenced by any of your decks, it is kept for seven days and then removed.

Diagrams

A diagram block holds a mermaid, graphviz, d2 or plantuml spec. Rendering happens on the server and produces a sanitised vector image, which then travels with the slide like any other content.

Speaker notes

Each slide has a speaker-notes field below the canvas. Notes are yours — they are not part of the slide.

Citations and sources

A deck carries a list of sources, and each slide cites them by number. Add a source to the deck, then attach its number to whichever slides make a claim from it.

Sources can be added, and an existing source’s title or link can be corrected in place. They cannot be deleted or reordered while any citation exists — the numbers are what the slides point at, and reordering would silently re-point them at the wrong source.

Exporting

There are two export formats, and they are not equally available.

Format	Availability
PowerPoint (.pptx)	Available wherever the deck editor is.
PDF	Needs a separately configured rendering service. Where it is not configured the PDF button does not appear at all.

PDF export has one more condition: your session must be unlocked. Slide images are encrypted with your session key, so a locked session could only produce a PDF with every image missing — the export refuses rather than handing you a broken file.

The PDF is a print of the deck’s own renderer, not a conversion of the PowerPoint file, so it matches what you see in the editor. It takes noticeably longer than the PowerPoint export, which is a quick server-side render.

There is no in-app presenter mode. Export to PowerPoint or PDF and present from there.

Undo, redo and saving

Every change — manual or AI, on a block, a slide or the deck — goes onto one undo stack, per deck. The toolbar shows whether there is anything to undo or redo, and the saving indicator tells you when a change has landed.

Getting Work Out — the other output forms and export formats
AI-Generated Diagrams in Reports — how diagrams are generated elsewhere in LumaVista
How Credits Work — what spends credits and where to watch your balance