Generate a Deck From One Prompt: From Brief to Boardroom

The basic flow: four steps to a finished deck

Making a PPT with WorkBuddy follows a fixed path: describe the requirement → get an outline first → generate pages after confirmation → export and deliver. Skip the outline and ask it to lay out slides right away and you'll almost certainly rework it, because once the structure is wrong, no amount of polish can rescue it.

A one-line brief needs four things spelled out

• Topic and audience: who will watch it decides the level of detail — conclusions for your boss, value for the client.
• Page count: give a range, say 10–12 pages; too much freedom dilutes the key points.
• Style: clean business, dark tech, formal review — ideally name your color preference too.
• Data source: reference your Excel sheet or report with @; don't let it invent numbers out of thin air.

Cover all four and the first version will be far more usable.

Outline first — don't rush into layout

Ask for the outline only: "Give me a 10-page structure for this topic, one title plus three bullet points per page, no design yet." Then revise the structure: merge duplicate pages, reorder, add a conclusions page. Once the structure is settled, have it generate the pages from the outline. Five extra minutes here saves half an hour of rework.

How to request data and chart pages

Chart pages work best as a separate request: "On page 6, use a bar chart to show revenue across four quarters, label the year-over-year change, and take the data from the table I gave you — don't add any new data." It can turn figures in a table into a chart, but the definitions are yours to police — units, time range, tax inclusive or not — so nail them down in the instruction.

Style and templates

If you have a company template, reference it directly with @ and have it follow the fonts, colors and layout; without one, describe the style in keywords and add hard constraints: "no more than 12 characters per title, no more than 3 bullets in the body". Consistency comes from constraints, not from piling up adjectives.

Export and delivery

The finished deck is in the results panel. After exporting it as a PPT file, open it locally once more: check whether fonts were substituted, whether charts are misaligned, whether there's leftover content in the notes pages. Before sending it outside, delete or replace any page with sensitive data.

A reusable prompt template

Save the following as your own template and just swap out the bracketed parts:

Make me a PPT on [topic] for [audience], 10–12 pages, in a [clean business / dark tech] style. Give me the outline first, with a title and three bullet points per page, and generate the pages after I confirm. Use only the table I've @-referenced, label units on chart pages, and keep the conclusions page to three points at most.

Three pitfalls to avoid

• Have it cite sources: for content like industry data and market size, require "cite the source, and mark anything you can't verify as pending verification" — don't take it straight into a presentation.
• Don't ask for 30 pages at once: the more pages, the thinner the content. Build a 10-page through-line first, then add an appendix.
• Don't expect it to know your internal jargon: spell out abbreviations the first time they appear, or it will easily misread them.

When the deck is done, you can turn it into a speaker script, or head to hands-on tutorials to see how document tasks chain together.