Presentation mode

Sometimes you need an answer. Sometimes you need to present an answer. Presentation mode turns any rich thola reply into a slideshow you can run from your laptop with speaker notes — without leaving the chat.

When to use it

A few times this gets reached for:

• Investor updates — "Show me last quarter's traction, then go to PMF."
• Board meetings — "Walk through the five modules, one slide each."
• Team all-hands — "Present this month's wins and one priority for next month."
• Your own thinking — splitting a complex answer into slides forces clarity.

How to start

Two ways:

1. From a reply — click the slide icon in the bottom-right of any rich reply. The reply gets recomposed into slides.
2. From scratch — type present: followed by your prompt. "present: our Q2 traction and the three biggest risks."

Either way, thola produces a deck of typically 5–12 slides. You can adjust the count by asking ("make it tighter — 6 slides max").

What a slide looks like

Every slide has three components:

• Title — one sentence, ≤ 8 words
• Body — a small set of facts: a chart, a 3–4 bullet list, or a quote
• Speaker note — what you (or whoever's presenting) should say, in conversational prose

Speaker notes are visible only to the presenter (you), not on the projected screen.

Presenter view vs. audience view

When you enter presentation mode, two windows open:

• Audience view — the full-screen slide. Drop this on the projector.
• Presenter view — current slide preview, next slide preview, speaker notes, elapsed time, and a slide nav rail.

If you're presenting on a single screen (no projector), use the Speaker notes panel at the bottom of the audience view; it scrolls with each slide.

Editing slides

Each slide is editable inline:

• Click the title → edit the title
• Click a chart → swap chart type or change the date range
• Click a bullet → edit the bullet
• Right-click anywhere on a slide → "Replace slide" → ask thola to redo it

The edits are saved with the deck. You can have multiple decks in one chat; switch between them in the chat sidebar.

Charts in slides

When thola decides a slide needs a chart, it builds one from the live data — not a static image. That means:

• The chart updates if the underlying data changes
• You can hover for values, even in audience view
• Export as PNG/PDF if you need to send the deck offline

The chart types thola picks from:

• Line — for time series (revenue, runway, headcount)
• Bar — for comparisons (sources, segments, regions)
• Stacked bar — for composition (expenses by category)
• Pie / donut — only for ≤ 5 categories (we resist these otherwise)
• Number card — for headline metrics that don't need a chart

Export

A deck can be exported as:

• PDF — preserves layout, charts as vectors
• PPTX — opens in PowerPoint; slides are editable but charts become images
• Markdown — slides as headings + body, speaker notes as comments
• PNG zip — one image per slide

Export is in the top-right of the audience view. Generated decks are watermarked at the bottom (thola.ai) — you can remove the watermark on the Growth plan and above.

Saving and reusing decks

A deck is saved with its source chat. To find an old deck:

• Open the chat
• Tap the Decks tab inside the chat
• Each deck shows its title, slide count, and last-edited date

Decks themselves can be cloned: open a deck, choose Clone → it becomes a new deck in the current chat with the same content, freshly editable.

A worked example

You: "present: our growth story for Q2, for a board deck."

thola produces 8 slides:

1. Q2 in one number — revenue figure, MoM change
2. Where it came from — bar chart by source
3. Where it didn't come from — sources that declined
4. Pipeline coming into Q3 — pipeline value & confidence
5. The team that did it — headcount changes, key hires
6. What we burned — net burn, runway position
7. The one thing we got wrong — biggest miss with diagnosis
8. What we're betting on next — the goal for Q3

Each slide comes with a 2–4 sentence speaker note. Run it from your laptop, advance with arrow keys, and you've prepped a 15-minute board update in five minutes.

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