How to Turn a Slide Deck into a Narrated Explainer Video

Slide files are not an accepted upload, so the route runs through a PDF export. What changes when the source is a deck: speaker notes, slide order, and the half the presenter said out loud.

Per Harald Borgen

12 Sep 2026 — 10 min read

Export the deck to PDF first. No slide format is on the accepted upload list for Scrimba Explain, listed in ChatGPT's plugin directory as Explain Video Generator, and slides appear in its documentation only as a kind of PDF. That export takes about thirty seconds and it is the easy half. The hard half is that a deck is not a document. It is a prop for a live performance, written to be talked over, so the file by itself is missing the part a presenter said out loud. This guide covers the export that keeps your speaker notes, the slide order that has to change, and what a deck leaves out on purpose. Explain is free during open beta.

Disclosure: Scrimba publishes this article and makes Explain. It is the worked example for one narrow reason: its documentation names exactly what can be attached, so the format claim here can be checked against a vendor page instead of taken on trust. Anyone weighing tools against each other will get more out of the comparison of explainer video makers.

Can You Upload a PowerPoint File Directly?

No. Export it to PDF, and the reason is worth two minutes because it is where most published advice goes wrong.

There is a genuine contradiction between the two surfaces. The ChatGPT plugin listing advertises a six item use list whose first entry is a deck:

Turn a slide deck or PDF into training your team will actually watch

The product documentation is narrower. Scrimba's Attaching documents page lists what can be attached, and slides show up in one place only:

Category	What it covers
Code files	`.js`, `.ts`, `.py`, `.html`, `.css`, `.json` and other source files
Text and markdown	Notes, READMEs, logs, config files
PDFs	Papers, documentation, slides
Images	Screenshots, diagrams, photos of a whiteboard
Jupyter notebooks	`.ipynb` files

The upload control on scrimba.com/explain says the same thing in fewer words: "Upload PDFs, Word docs or images and get a watchable lesson back", with badges reading PDF, DOCX and PNG. PPTX, KEY and ODP appear nowhere.

The two are describing different things. The listing names the outcome, which is real: people do turn decks into training videos with it. The upload control names the mechanism, and the mechanism runs on PDF. If you have read elsewhere that a presentation file can be dropped straight in, that page is describing something no vendor documentation supports.

This is less of a compromise than it sounds. Once your deck is a PDF, everything about how a document becomes a narrated video applies, and the guide on turning a PDF into a video covers those routes and their costs. The rest of this page is about the part that guide cannot cover, because it only shows up when the source began life as slides.

Export So the Speaker Notes Survive

Default export writes the slides and silently drops the notes. That is the single most expensive mistake in this workflow, because the notes are the half of the file that contains actual sentences.

Google Slides. Open Print settings and preview, choose 1 slide with notes in the toolbar, then print and pick a PDF destination. You now have one page per slide with the notes underneath.

PowerPoint on Windows. The Save as PDF dialog has a Publish what option for saving something other than plain slides. That is where notes pages live. Microsoft's own description of what a PDF does to your file is the useful part: "When you save presentation as a PDF file it freezes the formatting and layout."

PowerPoint on macOS. This one will cost you twenty minutes if nobody tells you, so here it is verbatim from Microsoft: "Features such as saving notes, saving slides as handouts, including hidden slides in the PDF, or setting the PDF to a smaller file size aren't available." The workaround is unglamorous. Paste the notes into a document and attach that alongside the slide PDF, since Word documents and plain text are both accepted, and a long paste becomes an attachment on its own.

Keynote on Mac. Apple's guide is explicit: "Select the checkbox next to presenter notes and skipped slides if you want to print them." Keynote also offers Print each stage of builds, where "each build is printed on its own page, in the same order as they appear in the presentation." That is the one place an animated reveal survives the export instead of collapsing into one crowded slide.

Then a ten second check that saves a wasted generation. Open the exported PDF and try to select a sentence of body text. If nothing highlights, your deck was built from images, and there is no text in the file to read, only pictures.

What a Deck Leaves Out on Purpose

A slide is a headline over an argument that a person delivered. Nobody writes a deck to be read alone, and the better the deck, the more it leaves out, because a good presenter puts six words on screen and spends ninety seconds on them.

Hand over slides with no notes and the narration can only read the bullets back at greater length. It sounds like a video. It teaches nothing, and the person watching cannot say why. The material that made the deck work is missing, and it is usually one of these:

The reasoning between two slides. Often in the notes, sometimes only in the presenter's head.
The numbers behind a chart, when the chart is a pasted image.
The definition of an internal term or an acronym that everyone in that room already knew.
Why the recommendation is the recommendation, as opposed to what it is.
The objection the audience always raises, and the answer to it.

The distinction worth holding on to: a deck is a prompt for a person, not a record of an explanation. Everything that is not in the file has to arrive some other way, either in the prompt or as a second attachment.

That second attachment is the underrated move. A short document listing your five acronyms, the source of the chart, and the two sentences you always say between slide four and slide five will change the output more than any amount of prompt wording.

Fix the Order Before You Generate

Presentation order is designed for a room and for suspense. Watching order is not, and someone alone at their desk wants the answer early.

The recurring mismatches:

The agenda slide, which means nothing to a person watching alone.
The conclusion held to the end for effect, when the viewer wants it in the first minute.
One word section dividers that carry no content at all.
An appendix sitting behind a thank you slide, full of the detail people actually ask about.
Hidden or skipped slides, which some export paths include and others cannot.
A title slide dated for a meeting that has already happened.

Two rules cover most of it. Cut the slides that only worked live, and say in your prompt where the answer should come. On hidden slides specifically, whether they are included is a setting on some platforms and simply unavailable on others, so check the exported file rather than trusting the checkbox.

Trimming a twelve slide deck to seven usually improves the result more than rewriting the prompt does.

Two Routes In, and They Are Not the Same

There are two documented ways to hand over the PDF, and they behave differently.

Upload on scrimba.com. Drop the file onto the composer or use the attach button, then pick a teaching style before you ask. Seven are documented, and they produce genuinely different lessons rather than different accents: Explain keeps to simple words and small steps, TLDR returns a few slides with the core point, Professor goes down to how things work underneath.

The ChatGPT plugin. One thing first: the plugin does nothing until it is installed. Mention its name in a session that has not installed it and ChatGPT answers in ordinary prose, with no error and no warning, which reads exactly like a broken product. The companion guide How to Install and Use a ChatGPT Plugin walks that route end to end, and this page assumes you have done it. Install once and it works in both ChatGPT and Codex. Plugins run in ChatGPT on web, desktop and mobile, and in the Codex CLI's plugin browser, but not in the IDE extension.

The difference matters more than it looks:

What you do	Upload on scrimba.com	ChatGPT plugin
Getting the file in	Attach the PDF to the composer	Attach it in the chat and @ mention the plugin
Choosing a teaching style	Available, seven of them	Not available
Where the explainer lives	On your Scrimba account	Unlisted at a link, claimed by signing in

The teaching style gap is documented rather than incidental. Explainers made through the plugin or a coding agent "are written by that AI in its own voice, so the style picker doesn't apply there." For a deck that is a real consideration: the model in your chat writes the script, so the same PDF can produce a different lesson depending on where you hand it over.

If you want a survey of what else sits in the directory, the roundup of ChatGPT plugins for creating videos covers that ground, and the product guide covers Explain itself in more depth.

Write the Prompt the Deck Cannot

Because the deck omits the audience and the purpose, your prompt has to carry both. Four things are worth naming every time: who is watching and what they already know, what they should be able to do afterwards, where the answer should appear, and which slides to ignore.

Here is our onboarding deck, exported with the speaker notes underneath each slide.
Audience: new joiners in their first week, no prior context on our tools.
Goal: they should be able to complete their first task without asking anyone.
Put the conclusion in the first 30 seconds, then the detail.
Skip the agenda slide, the title slide and the thank you slide.
Where the notes and the slide disagree, follow the notes.

The last line matters more than its length suggests. Slides get edited and the notes underneath them do not always follow, so naming which one wins removes a whole class of errors that stay invisible until someone watches. Narration is available in 33 languages, each with a voice native to that language rather than an English voice reading it, which matters if the people watching are not all in one country.

Check It Before You Send It to Anyone

Real output is easy to inspect without an account. The public gallery on scrimba.com/explain carries a filter reading 150 results, and each entry shows a title, an author, a runtime and a view count. On 8 September 2026 it listed The Human Respiratory System by Nadim at 0:51 with 69 views, What is SEO? at 0:58 with 48 views, and What Docker Actually Does at 1:14 with 31 views.

What that proves is narrower than it looks. Those are explainers built from a typed prompt, not from decks. Scrimba publishes no slide deck example, and this article does not invent one.

So check your own. Compare the narration against the deck's numbers first, because a chart pasted as an image is the likeliest thing to be misread. Scrimba's own documentation says the tool can make mistakes and that anything important should be double checked, which applies with extra force here: the source was already an abbreviation of something a person said, so the narration is a reconstruction of a reconstruction.

If you are still deciding whether to pay for any of this, the survey of free AI video generators covers what the free tiers in this category actually allow.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you upload a PowerPoint file to an AI video tool?

Not to Scrimba Explain. Its documentation lists code files, text and markdown, PDFs, images and Jupyter notebooks, and slides appear only as a type of PDF. Export the deck to PDF and attach that. Some tools in this category do accept PPTX directly, so treat any claim of slide file support as something to check on that vendor's own documentation rather than on a listicle.

How do you export a slide deck to PDF with the speaker notes?

In Google Slides, open Print settings and preview and choose 1 slide with notes, then print to PDF. In PowerPoint on Windows, use the Publish what option in the Save as PDF dialog. In Keynote on Mac, tick the presenter notes checkbox. PowerPoint on macOS cannot save notes to PDF at all, so paste them into a separate document.

Why does a video made from a slide deck sound so thin?

Because the deck was never the explanation. A presenter puts a few words on a slide and says the rest out loud, so a file with no speaker notes contains headlines and nothing else. The narration can only expand those headlines. Attaching the notes, or a short document with the missing reasoning, fixes it.

Does the video look like the original slides?

No. An explainer is newly written slides with narration, not a re-skin of your deck, so the layout, fonts and animations do not carry over. If reproducing the original design matters more than explaining it, record the deck yourself instead of generating an explainer.

Is it free to turn a slide deck into a narrated video?

Scrimba Explain is free during open beta, and exporting a deck to PDF costs nothing in Google Slides, PowerPoint or Keynote. No pricing tiers have been announced for Explain, so treat any figure you see quoted elsewhere as unverified.

Key Takeaways

Slide files are not an accepted upload. Export the deck to PDF; slides appear in Scrimba Explain's documentation only as a kind of PDF.
The default export drops your speaker notes. Use 1 slide with notes in Google Slides, Publish what in PowerPoint on Windows, or the presenter notes checkbox in Keynote. PowerPoint on macOS cannot do it.
A deck omits what the presenter said out loud. Without the notes the narration can only read the bullets back, which is why deck derived videos sound hollow.
Presentation order is not watching order. Cut the agenda, the dividers and the thank you slide, and ask for the answer early.
The upload route and the plugin route differ. Teaching styles apply on scrimba.com and not through the plugin, and the plugin does nothing until it is installed.