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Intermediate training

Claude with PowerPoint

Build, edit, and review decks with Claude in Cowork. Outline first, slides second, narrative critique before visuals — the deck workflow that actually saves time without producing AI slop.

19 minutes Builds on Module 3.1 Includes slide critique

Start here

What you'll be able to do after this lesson

First-draft deck in one pass

Produce a usable first draft of a deck from a brief and a template in a single Cowork session — not a starting point that needs full rebuilding.

Slide-by-slide edits

Modify a specific slide on an existing deck without breaking the rest of it. Edit in place, not rebuild from scratch.

Review before you send

Run a narrative-and-hygiene pass on any deck — yours or Claude's — and catch the wrong-takeaway, the unlabeled chart, the bullet that doesn't survive without the speaker.

Three deck moves Claude does well

Outline-first, targeted edits, narrative critique

Outline-first generation

Story before slides. Get the argument right in a numbered outline before any visuals exist. A bad deck almost always traces back to a missing outline pass.

Targeted edits

Change one slide without rebuilding the rest. The right move is "rewrite slide 7 to lead with the number" — not "regenerate the whole deck because slide 7 is off."

Narrative critique

Does the deck argue what it claims to argue? Claude is good at finding slides that don't carry their weight, takeaways that don't survive without the speaker, and stories that drift off the audience's question.

Trainer note: A deck is an argument with visuals, not a stack of bullet points. If a slide doesn't move the argument forward, it's a slide that should be cut — not polished.

Where the work happens

Three surfaces, one workflow

Cowork with the .pptx

The main surface. Cowork can open the deck, modify specific slides, save the file back, and produce real .pptx output you can open in PowerPoint or Keynote.

Main surface

Chat for the outline

Before any slides exist, the outline lives in chat. Five or ten lines of structure, the audience's question, the decision you want them to leave with — sorted out before you open Cowork.

Outline first

A template in /Templates

For GMFS or client-facing decks, start from a real template — not from Claude's default theme. The template carries brand, layout, and visual hygiene Claude won't reinvent well.

Real template

Deck work

Five rules for usable first drafts

Give Claude the audience and the ask

Who's in the room, how much time you have, what decision you want them to leave with. Without those three, Claude defaults to a generic quarterly-review deck.

Supply or reference a template

Drop the .pptx template in the Cowork folder and tell Claude to use it. Layout, fonts, and brand are not where Claude should be improvising.

Build the outline before any slide generation

"Give me a 10-slide outline. One line per slide. Then wait." Approve the outline first; generate slides second. The outline is where the story gets fixed cheaply.

Edit one slide at a time

"Rewrite slide 7 to lead with the number" beats "rebuild the deck." Slide-level edits preserve everything you already approved.

Critique the story arc before polishing visuals

"Read the outline. Tell me where the argument breaks down or doesn't earn the takeaway." Run this pass before you ever touch fonts, colors, or chart styles.

Prompt upgrade

Weak prompt

Make me a deck on AI for our team.

Deck-ready prompt

Work-ready prompt

(In Cowork.) Build a 12-slide deck for the GMFS operations leadership team. 30-minute slot, 20 minutes of content. The decision they need to leave with: should we expand the Guidelines Engine to cover non-QM by Q1. Use the GMFS-deck-template.pptx in this folder. Give me the outline first — one line per slide — and wait for my edits before generating any slides.

Best patterns

Four deck workflows that earn the time

New-deck generation

Brief in chat, outline in chat, template in Cowork, slides in Cowork. The full first-draft pipeline.

Slide rework on an existing deck

Surgical edits. "Slide 7 is wrong — here's what it should say. Rewrite just slide 7, leave the rest." Claude is fast at this.

Narrative critique pass

Hand Claude a finished deck. Ask: "Where does the argument break down? Which slides don't carry their weight? Which takeaway doesn't survive without the speaker?"

Deck → one-pager extraction

"Compress the attached 18-slide deck into a one-page memo for someone who can't attend the meeting. Keep the argument; lose the slide structure."

Quality checks

Five things to verify on every deck

Every chart has a name, a date, a unit, and a source — no decorative charts Every slide has a one-sentence takeaway — not a topic, a takeaway The deck reads without the speaker — if the bullets only make sense when you're talking, the bullets are wrong Slide count fits the time slot — twenty minutes is fifteen content slides, not forty The deck answers the question the audience came in with — not the question Claude found easier to answer

Employee rule: The audience's question is the only one that matters. If a slide doesn't move the argument toward that question's answer, cut it. A shorter deck on the right question beats a longer deck on a near-miss question every time.

Build and edit

Six exercises to build deck fluency

Decks are where employees most often produce AI slop. Use these to build the habit of catching it before anyone else does.

Open the slide critique in this lesson. Click each pin to see the structural problem and the rewrite. Then toggle to the ship-ready version — the contrast is the lesson.
Produce a first-draft deck from a real brief you have this week. Time it. Note how long the outline pass takes versus the slide-generation pass.
Rework a single slide on a deck you already shipped. Pick the worst slide and run a targeted edit through Cowork.
Run a narrative critique on a deck you've already presented. Note which critique items match feedback you actually got in the room.
Convert a recent deck into a one-page memo for someone who didn't attend. Check whether the one-pager still makes the argument.
Build a reusable deck template — a real .pptx — that you'll point Claude at every time. Future-you will thank you.

Completion standard

You've finished this module when you have a personal deck workflow — outline pass, slide pass, narrative critique pass — that you run every time, and a reusable template Claude builds against.