“Make me a deck about the project” takes five seconds to type and usually costs an afternoon of fixes. This post gives you a brief you can copy and fill in, the order to work in so the structure is settled before any slide exists, and three before-and-after prompts for common decks. It works the same in ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or any other tool that drafts slides from a request.
Why one line isn’t enough
Microsoft’s own guide to prompting Copilot splits a prompt into four parts, the goal, the context, the sources and the expectations, and points out that only a clear goal is required. For a deck, a goal on its own is exactly what produces the version that could belong to any company. The tool knows you want slides about a project, so it builds the slides any project would have. We went through where that generic feel comes from in why AI-generated slides look generic. This post is about what to write instead.
The brief, in five parts
A useful brief answers five questions. Copy this and fill it in before you open the tool:
Audience: who will be in the room, and what they already know. Decision: what should happen when the meeting ends. Data: the numbers and facts the deck must use, pasted below or attached. Constraints: how long you have, how many slides, what to leave out. Tone: how it should sound, and anything the audience is sensitive to.
Audience changes everything else. A deck for your own team can skip the background. A deck for a finance director who has never heard of your project can’t. One sentence about what the audience already knows saves you three slides of context nobody asked for.
Decision is the part people leave out most often, and the one that matters most. “Present the project status” has no end point. “Get approval to move the launch by two weeks” does, and every slide either supports that request or doesn’t belong.
Data is whatever the tool can’t know on its own. If you don’t give it the numbers, it will either leave holes or fill them with figures that look plausible and come from nowhere.
Constraints keep the draft the right size. Ten minutes and six slides is a different deck from forty minutes and twenty.
Tone is one line. “Direct, no marketing language” or “careful, this team just had layoffs” both tell the tool something it can’t guess.
Work in four rounds, not one
The brief is the first round. The rest follow in this order, and each one is a separate message.
- Send the brief and ask only for the outline. Add a line like “Give me the slide headlines first, one sentence each, stating the slide’s conclusion. Don’t write the slides yet.”
- Check the outline against the brief. Read the headlines in order and ask two questions. Does this lead to the decision you wrote down? Is there a slide your audience doesn’t need? Fix it in plain words: “Drop slide 3, the board already knows the history. Move the risk slide before the budget.”
- Ask for the slides. Now that the order is fixed, ask for the content, with a limit like “no more than four bullets per slide.”
- Check the draft against your sources. Every number in the deck has to exist in the data you gave it.
Rounds two and three are where most of the time is saved. Reordering eight lines of outline takes a minute. Reordering eight finished slides, with their layouts and charts, takes far longer, and it’s often where people give up and start over.
Three before-and-after prompts
A project status update
Before: Make a presentation about the status of the CRM migration.
After: I’m presenting to the operations leadership team, who know the CRM migration exists but not the details. I need them to approve moving the go-live from March 3 to March 17. Here’s the situation: data migration is 80% done, user acceptance testing found 12 issues and 9 are fixed, and the remaining 3 affect invoicing. I have ten minutes, so keep it to six slides. Tone is direct, no blame. Give me the headlines first.
A training session
Before: Create slides on our new expense policy.
After: This is a 30-minute training for regional sales reps who submit expenses from the road, mostly on their phones. By the end they need to know the three rules that changed: receipts are required above $25 instead of $75, mileage is claimed weekly instead of monthly, and client dinners need pre-approval above $150. Skip the reasons behind the policy. One slide per rule with a real example, then a one-slide checklist. Plain, friendly language. Headlines first.
A client proposal
Before: Write a proposal deck for a new client.
After: The audience is the operations director and the customer service lead at a home repair company. They need to decide whether to sign a two-week discovery phase. Their numbers: 71% of bookings come in by phone, about 1 in 6 callers hangs up before booking, and a dispatcher spends around 20 hours a week retyping web requests. Our proposal is an online booking page tied to their dispatch software, in three fixed-fee phases. Eight slides. Confident but not salesy. End with next steps and dates. Outline first.
In each “after” version, the decision is stated in a single sentence and the data sits in the request itself. The tool still writes the slides, but it no longer has to guess what they’re for.
When you don’t have the numbers yet
Sometimes you need the deck before the data is final. Say so in the brief, and tell the tool what to do about it: “Where a figure is missing, write [PENDING: what’s needed] instead of a number.” That gives you a draft with visible gaps you can fill later, instead of one with invented figures you have to hunt down before you present.
Fix the structure before the format
A common complaint is that the tool gives you slides that are hard to change once they exist. Part of that depends on the tool and the file it hands back. Part of it comes from fixing things in the wrong order. Changing a font, a color or a layout is quick in any editor. Changing what a slide says, or what order the argument runs in, means rebuilding slides. Settle the structure in rounds one and two, while it’s still a list of sentences, and leave formatting for the end. If the deck has to end up as a PowerPoint file and you work with Claude, we compared the options in how to make a PowerPoint with Claude. The brief comes first in every one of them.
A brief that describes a real deck
Here’s a proposal we wrote ourselves, for a fictional home repair company with made-up numbers. The third prompt above is a brief that describes this deck. Notice how each part of it shows up in the slides: the discovery slide carries the client’s numbers, the investment slide breaks the work into fixed-fee phases, and the deck ends with dated next steps because the brief asked for a decision.
Online Booking Proposal for Hollisfen Home Services
A services proposal for a home repair company: the problem in the client's own numbers, scope, an 11-week plan, phased pricing and the metrics that define success.
The speaker notes on the last slide say which parts stay the same from one client to the next and which get rewritten. The same split applies to briefs. Keep a copy of a brief that worked, and next time change only the audience, the decision and the data.
Where SlideWeave fits
In SlideWeave you describe the presentation and get an editable first draft, then adjust it in a visual editor without writing code. A brief like the ones in this post gives you a better first draft there too, and the checks on structure and numbers are still yours. You can start free, no card required.