A method for generating presentation slides with distilled content including receiving one or more data files as source material for slide generation, obtaining content from the one or more data files for a slide of a slide presentation, identifying a layout template for the slide based on the content, and distilling the content into distilled content to generate a presentation visualization item based on the distilled content. The distilled content may include a subset of the content. The method may also include generating the slide based on the presentation visualization item and the layout template.