You generated a 12-slide deck, 3 slides are wrong, and now you have to regenerate the entire thing — losing the 9 good slides. The new Pencil UI is surgical. Describe what you want changed in plain language. Queue revisions across slides. Batch-apply in one generation. In testing across 80+ revision cycles, final decks reach professional quality in 1 generation + 3–5 targeted revisions.
Generate from your research notebook. Revise individual slides for different committee members’ expertise levels. Every finding traces to your uploaded papers. No hallucinations, no uncited assertions.
Copy research revision prompts →Queue executive-tone revisions, add problem/solution layouts, compress to 4 bullets per slide. Export PPTX, add branding in PowerPoint, present with confidence.
Copy business revision prompts →Upload course materials. Generate a deck. Revise for student reading level. Add discussion questions per slide. Export. Present. Update next semester with one revision pass.
Copy teaching revision prompts →The headline revision prompts turn topic labels (“Key Findings”) into takeaway headlines (“Three Interventions Cut Dropout by 34%”). The single most impactful slide revision you can make.
Copy headline revision prompts →This page covers revisions. To generate your first deck, start with the Slide Deck Generator. For the full feature overview, see Slide Decks Overview.
Generate your first deck →| Dimension | Old Workflow (Pre-2026) | New Pencil UI (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Editing model | Element-level: click text box, type replacement | Prompt-based: describe changes in natural language |
| Scope | One element at a time | Queue across multiple slides, batch-apply |
| To fix 3 slides | Regenerate all 12 slides (~90 sec × 6 rounds) | Revise only the 3 slides (~30 sec each) |
| Time to final deck | ~15 min (avg 6 full regenerations) | ~5 min (1 gen + 3–5 revisions) |
| Risk to good slides | High — regeneration changes everything | Zero — unchanged slides are preserved exactly |
Open Studio → Slide Deck → Generate. (New to this step? See the Slide Deck Generator guide for the full 6-step workflow.) Review the full deck once without editing. Note which slides miss the mark and what needs to change. That list becomes your revision queue.
Click the pencil icon on any slide. A text input panel opens. Type your revision instruction in plain language. The request is logged against that slide number. Be directive: “Rewrite this as a bold claim backed by the statistic” beats “make this more engaging.”
Navigate to other slides via the thumbnail panel. Each slide can hold multiple revision requests — they stack. The thumbnail badge shows pending request count per slide. Add requests in any order.
The revision queue panel shows all pending requests across all slides in one view. Check for conflicts. Slides without queued requests will not be changed.
NotebookLM processes all queued requests in a single pass. Changed slides are marked in the thumbnail panel. Unchanged slides are preserved exactly. If a revised slide misses the mark, add a new request and regenerate only that slide — no re-queuing the whole deck.
Four components separate reliable revision prompts from inconsistent ones:
Be explicit: “slide 3,” “the opening slide,” “all slides in the evidence section,” or “every slide title.” Vague scope like “the middle section” produces unpredictable results. Global sweeps (“rewrite all slide titles”) are reliable for structural rules. Targeted fixes (“add a stat to slide 4”) are better for content-level changes.
Use the 6 revision types below as starting points. Specify the output format: “rewrite as an action statement under 10 words” is reliable; “make it better” is not. Reference uploaded sources explicitly when you want specific data.
End every revision prompt with a measurable quality criterion: “scannable in under 5 seconds by an executive,” “phrased so a first-year student can understand without context,” “contains exactly one statistic and one action verb.”
Always add: “Do not change any other slides” and “Do not add claims not present in the uploaded sources.” Without these, the model may hallucinate or inadvertently edit correct slides.
Tone revision — Rewrite for a different audience (executive, student, technical, public). Use when the same deck needs to serve multiple stakeholders.
Structure revision — Change layout: before/after columns, problem/solution split, numbered steps. Use when a slide is a wall of text that needs visual hierarchy.
Density revision — Compress or expand. “Reduce to 4 bullets, each under 12 words” or “expand this one-liner into 3 supporting points with evidence.”
Data revision — Add, replace, or highlight specific data. “Replace the generic claim with the exact statistic from [SOURCE NAME].”
Headline revision — Rewrite the slide title as an action statement or takeaway instead of a topic label. “Change ‘Research Methodology’ to a statement of what the methodology reveals.”
Global revision — Apply the same rule across all slides. For advanced global formatting rules like McKinsey pyramid logic, see the Advanced Workflows guide. “Rewrite every slide title as an action statement. Ensure no title exceeds 8 words.”
All 25 revision templates unlock below ↓
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Get Category Bundle — $19.99Layout requests are approximate. Revision prompts that ask for column counts or visual arrangements are interpreted by the model. Describe precisely: “two equal-width columns, left header: Problem, right header: Solution” works better than “a two-column layout.”
One concern per prompt. Stacking tone + layout + length in one prompt produces less predictable results than three separate, focused prompts. The queue accommodates multiple prompts per slide — use that to your advantage.
Source-grounded only. Revisions remain grounded in your notebook sources. You cannot introduce new claims. For significant content additions, update your notebook sources first, then revise.
No version history. Export a PPTX before beginning revisions to preserve the pre-revision state. Then revise and export a second PPTX for the final version.