Decks & presentations

A deck in Zettly is a presentation built from the same vault you use for everything else. Every slide is a canvas scene — the same infinite-canvas engine that powers Boards — so the drawing tools, widgets, and connectors you already know work in slides too.

The key idea is that a deck is content, not a separate file format. If you change a note that’s pinned to a slide, the slide updates. If you rearrange a board that the AI used to generate a deck, the deck reflects the new shape. There’s no exporting, no re-importing, no “is this the latest version?” anxiety.

This page covers how decks work, how to build one, how to present, and how to use the AI assistant to draft a deck from a board.

The deck model

A deck is a sequence of slides. Each slide is a canvas scene — a flat surface with shapes, widgets, ink, and connectors. The slide rail on the left shows thumbnails of all the slides in order; click a thumbnail to jump to that slide.

A few things to know:

• Slides are ordered but not strictly linear. You can drag slides around in the rail to reorder them, and you can branch a deck into a “bonus” section that you skip in the standard run.
• Slides can be different sizes. The default is 16:9 widescreen, but you can switch a single deck to 4:3, square, or a custom aspect. Useful for talks vs. printed handouts.
• Slides share a theme. The colors, fonts, and default styles come from a theme you set per deck. See the section on themes below.
• A deck is a single file in the vault. It’s a structured format, version-controllable and inspectable.

The end result feels like a presentation tool, but it’s wired into the same vault as the rest of your work.

Building a slide

A new slide starts as a blank canvas. The drawing tools and widget set are identical to Boards, so if you’ve built a board, you can build a slide.

A typical slide combines:

• A title as a text widget, styled with the deck’s theme
• A live widget anchored to the slide — a note, a graph slice, a calendar view, a task list
• Supporting shapes — callouts, arrows, captions, decorative elements
• Ink for hand-drawn emphasis (especially useful in early drafts)

The widget layer is what makes a Zettly deck different. When you drop a note widget on a slide, the slide shows the current content of that note. Update the note, the slide updates. This is the killer feature for talks about your work — your slides are always in sync with the source material.

The slide rail

The slide rail on the left of the deck view is your map. Each slide gets a thumbnail that updates as you edit the slide. You can:

• Reorder by dragging
• Duplicate a slide as a starting point for a new one
• Hide a slide from the standard run (it stays in the deck for reference or as a backup)
• Delete with a single keystroke
• Group slides into sections (Introduction, Body, Conclusion) that you can collapse and reorder as units

The rail also shows slide numbers, which the present mode uses for navigation.

Present mode

Press the present button (or hit a shortcut) and the deck goes full-screen. Present mode hides the editor chrome, the slide rail, and the sidebar. The current slide fills the screen, and the next slide is one click or keystroke away.

A few present-mode niceties:

• Speaker notes — each slide has a notes field that only you can see in present mode. Press a key to toggle a notes overlay.
• A timer — useful for timed talks. The timer is hidden from the audience.
• A laser pointer — a temporary mark that follows your cursor. It’s the standard “look at this” gesture.
• Blackout — a single keypress to black out the screen. The audience sees a black slide until you hit it again. The “is the projector working?” panic-button.
• Slide numbers — optional, shown as a small overlay.

Present mode is also a good way to review a deck on its own — full-screen, distraction-free.

Exporting to PDF

A deck can be exported to a PDF for sharing, printing, or sending to people who don’t use Zettly. The export respects the slide aspect ratio and the theme, so the PDF looks like the deck.

A few things to know about the export:

• Live widgets are rendered at export time. A note widget on a slide becomes a snapshot of the current note. If you want the PDF to show a specific version of a note, edit or duplicate the note before exporting.
• Ink is preserved. The hand-drawn strokes on a slide show up in the PDF exactly as they do in the app.
• The slide order is the PDF order. Hidden slides are excluded by default; you can include them with a checkbox.
• The PDF is generated locally. Your deck doesn’t get sent to a server to be converted.

AI deck builder

The AI assistant can draft a deck for you. The most useful starting point is a board — the AI can read the board’s layout and propose a slide sequence that walks through the widgets in a sensible order.

A typical AI deck builder flow:

1. Open a board that’s summarizing a project, a plan, or a piece of research.
2. Open the AI assistant and ask for a deck. Something like “make a 10-slide deck from this board.”
3. The assistant proposes a slide sequence: a title slide, a few slides for each major widget on the board, and a closing slide.
4. Each proposed slide is a draft — the AI has placed widgets, written titles, and added a few supporting shapes. You review and adjust.
5. You accept the deck. It becomes a real deck in your vault, wired to the same widgets the board used.

A few things this is good for:

• First drafts. You skip the blank-deck paralysis. The AI gets you to a starting point, you refine.
• Long projects that span many notes. The AI walks the wikilink graph from a starting note and proposes a narrative.
• Variations. Ask for the same content as a 5-slide talk, a 20-slide deep-dive, and a 1-slide summary. The AI adapts.

The AI never modifies an existing deck without your approval. Every proposed slide comes with a preview, and undo is one click away. See AI assistant for the full model.

Decks read from the same vault

This is the central idea, and worth saying twice.

When you put a note widget on a slide, the slide shows the current note. Edit the note in Notes & editing and the slide updates the next time you view the deck. There’s no “save a copy for the deck” step.

The same is true for task widgets, calendar widgets, and graph widgets. A task widget on a slide reads from the same Tasks hub a board widget would. A calendar widget on a slide reads from the same Calendar surface. A graph widget reads from the same Knowledge graph.

This means:

• A single source of truth. The note, the board, the deck — all reading from the same vault.
• No version drift. If you updated a note for the talk, the deck shows the update.
• Easy to repurpose. Drop the same widgets on a board and a deck; both stay in sync.

It’s the opposite of the “save as PDF, attach to email” pattern. The deck is alive.

Themes and styling

Each deck has a theme — a set of colors, fonts, and default styles for the slide background, the title text, body text, and callouts. You can:

• Pick from built-in themes that come with the app.
• Build a custom theme by setting the colors and fonts you want.
• Reuse a theme across decks so a series of presentations looks consistent.

Themes are local to a single deck by default. If you want a theme to apply across all your decks, save it as a “shared theme” and pick it from the theme menu on each new deck.

Tips and conventions

A few things that aren’t obvious until you’ve built a few decks:

• Start with a board. A board is a more natural place to collect the pieces of a talk. Once the board looks right, ask the AI to turn it into a deck, or duplicate the board’s widgets into slides by hand.
• One idea per slide. A Zettly slide is a canvas — you can put a lot on it. Resist the temptation. A slide that says one thing clearly is more useful than a slide that says five things densely.
• Use the speaker notes. They’re the place for the things you want to say but not show. The notes aren’t part of the slide, but they show up in present mode when you need them.
• Hide slides for backup. Build the “happy path” of your talk as the main run, and keep a few alternate slides hidden in the rail. If a question takes you off-script, jump to the relevant hidden slide and back.
• Export to PDF before the talk. Belt and suspenders. The PDF is your fallback if the projector doesn’t trust your app.

See Boards for the canvas engine that powers slides, and AI assistant for the agent that can draft a deck for you.