I want to make a presentation.

How to write a prompt for an AI slide deck

Use this form for a deck from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot in PowerPoint, Gamma or a similar tool. Not every tool builds the slides: Slides in ChatGPT is on the Pro, Business and Enterprise plans only. If your tool cannot make one, choose “Just the words” under “What you want back”.

Why the recommended questions matter

• The deck and its goal. Anthropic’s tutorial suggests saying what the deck is for; its first example ends on the decisions needed from the room.
• Audience. Copilot in PowerPoint may ask who the audience is when you have not said, and Gamma’s agent, in its default mode, asks about your goal and audience before it builds.
• How it will be used. In one experiment, 110 engineering students watched the same technical talk; those shown slides with a sentence headline, a graphic and about half the words understood it better than those shown topic-and-bullet slides. That is one study, on one subject, with students. A review of 57 studies of learning material found that showing key terms from a narration worked better than showing all of it.
• Time and slides. In Gamma the slide count is a setting, and at the time of writing the free plan builds up to 10 slides at a time.
• Your material. Anthropic’s tutorial says a deck can turn out generic when Claude had little to work from.
• For a deck you already have, what to fix. It replaces time and slides as a recommended question: saying what must stay tells the AI what to leave alone (this site’s reasoning).

What the form adds

In every mode, three lines:

• One asks for one argument that ends on what the audience should do or decide.
• One asks for a full-sentence headline on each slide, one idea per slide, and evidence rather than decoration. The headline rule rests on the experiment above (teaching slides); the rest is the makers’ advice.
• One tells the AI not to invent figures, quotes, names or sources, and to leave a bracketed placeholder, listed at the end. OpenAI’s prompt guidance advises placeholders over unsupported specifics, and Anthropic’s tutorial says Claude is designed to ask for a missing figure or leave a visible placeholder. In a 2026 preprint, eight deck generators scored 28.8 to 54.1 out of 100 for keeping to the material they were given. Check every number yourself.

A document or your own deck adds a fourth line: keep the facts, and report what changed.

Outline first, and the look in the tool

The form asks for an outline to approve first; Gemini in Google Slides and Gamma’s agent also show a plan before they build. Gamma sets image source, art style and amount of text for the whole deck. In Gamma, paste the prompt where it asks what you want to make, not into Paste in text, which turns what you paste into slides.

A worked example

A board update, built from notes:

I need a slide presentation: A 10-minute update for our board that ends with them approving two new support hires for January.

<context>
Who is in the audience: Five board members. They know the business well but have not seen the support numbers. They care about cost and about losing customers.
I will present it live, so keep the words on each slide few: the detail is what I will say.
</context>

<source_material>
My notes and material:
Median time to first reply, by month: June 4 hours, July 5, August 7, September 9, October 11, November 12 (help desk export, November 8).
Tickets per month: 1,900 in June, 3,100 in November.
Support team: 6 agents, the same number since January.
Customers who canceled since June: 212. Of those, 131 had waited more than a day for a first reply at least once.
Cost of two more agents: $140,000 a year, all in.
The ask: approve both hires at the December 15 meeting so they start in January.
</source_material>

<task>
The points to make, in order:
1. Replies now take three times as long as in June.
2. Most customers who canceled had waited more than a day for a reply.
3. The team has not grown while tickets rose by more than half.
4. Two hires cost $140,000 a year.
5. The ask: approve both on December 15.
Show these as charts or tables, using only the numbers I have given: One line chart of median time to first reply by month, June to November.
Make the deck build one argument from the first slide to the last, and end on what the audience should do or decide.
</task>

<constraints>
Tone: Plain and direct. Honest about the cost. No hype.
Look and template: I will attach our company template. Navy and white. No stock photos.
Use only the facts and figures in my material. Do not add outside facts.
Leave out: Company history, the org chart, and anything about pricing.
Give every slide a headline that states its point in a full sentence. Keep to one idea per slide, and support it with evidence (a number, a chart, a diagram or an example), not decoration.
Do not invent figures, quotes, names or sources. Where a slide needs one I have not given you, put a placeholder in [brackets] and list every placeholder at the end.
</constraints>

<output_format>
Time and number of slides: 10 minutes to present, 5 for questions. 8 slides at most, counting the title slide.
First give me an outline: one line per slide, with its headline and what goes on it. Wait for my OK before you build the slides.
Write short speaker notes for every slide: the two or three things to say.
Make it as a PowerPoint file (.pptx).
</output_format>

If the information here is not enough to answer well, say so and tell me what you would need. If something missing would materially change the result, ask me up to 3 short questions first. Otherwise proceed and state your assumptions.