Comment by RobinL
6 days ago
Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?
6 days ago
Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?
Claude for Powerpoint will generate legitimately beautiful decks for you. The chat app will create them as artifacts also.
My pipeline for this is vscode + prompts + markdown templates + GitHub copilot -> markdown docs -> pandoc to produce.docx -> copilot in word for “nice” formatting -> copilot in ppt for nice decks. LLMs all the way down.
I find it’s easier to version control and diff the .md artefacts, those remain my authoritative source.
Wow. Seems like a headache compared to how I make slides the old fashioned way: copy and paste my figures into blank powerpoint.
I was doing something like this, and then realized at least with claude that it’s so much better at HTML that it’s better to get an HTML-first deck together, which could then be turned into a PPT template and/or PDF directly, depending on needs.
It saved me a fair number of design-tweak steps in the md -> pandoc part of the workflow. Realistically, hand editing claude’s HTML is also easy in most cases, so I didn’t feel like I lost much (for the generative cases). Similarly if it’s mostly what I’ve written directly that’s the source it’ll be in markdown, and I’ve found it’s a faster path to have md -> (LLM-translated HTML deck) -> pdf.
If you don't want an LLM to write the words, surely you also want to decide on the data and graphs to show by yourself? Isn't that 90% of a presentation? The "looking nice" part doesn't matter as much, it could be black text on a white background and it would be fine.
The important part is the presentation matching your presenting cadence, which is something LLM generated presentations never get right. I don't have a problem with people generating presentations, but most of the time they just end up reading whatever is on the screen when presenting.
With a little bit of work, it works very well. You can generate powerpoint directly with Codex or Claude Cowork. There is also Canva support for these tools and it has its own AI integration. Another useful tool in this space is the Gemini integration in Google slides.
If you are a bit technical, reveal.js is actually really nice for this. I one shotted a pdf export for that uses a headless browser. I've used that a few times now.
What works well for me is to take an existing presentation and then some raw input and generate a new presentation in the same style as the old one from the raw input. After that, I can go in and tweak individual slides.
Another thing I did recently was take somebody's existing pitch deck and fix it with a one line prompt: "this deck is a bit meh, pimp it!" that worked unreasonably well. I like using shitty prompts like that. Codex often manages to do the right thing if you don't overthink your prompts.
Classic deck of somebody that used way too much text and only bullets. It did a great job on that presenting the content in a more simple and better structured way. Pulling out key facts and highlighting those, simplifying text, etc. Doing that manually would have taken hours.