I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted pixel-pushing PowerPoint presentations, wrestling over what goes on the slide and what goes in the notes. Really it's too many.

Every time I've moved roles, I've found myself opening Word to update my CV - always asking myself if it's presented well, relevant and going to stand out.

Then there's every Excel file hastily thrown together by a delivery manager, having me cast my mind back to high school IT to remember that one Excel function I've not used in 20 years.

Well, we've entered an enlightened era. You can safely put these problems to rest, and start focussing more on the content and less on the presentation.

When I saw AI Twitter X blow up my phone's notifications, instantly I had to give this a try. Opening the Claude app on my laptop seeing the Cowork button nestled between Chat and Code, the only thought that came to mind was "What do I ask for?"

After a few minutes of Claude auto-setting up, you're asked to select a working directory - call me a cynic, everything I've seen from OpenClaw has taught me not to give LLMs wider access than they need, so I created a folder just for this task and only allowed Claude access to that.

I couldn't tell you why but "Build me a 3 page presentation comparing Arabica vs Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, the final slide being a direct comparison" was the first thing that came to mind.

Within a few moments, a task list appeared "Install Dependencies", "Write the Presentation Script", "Create the PPTX", "Visually QA the slides", and Claude was off. It took a few minutes to come back, but oh boy did it!

I'm a huge coffee geek, so the moment I saw that large Microsoft Powerpoint button appear, I hit it. Instantly opening Powerpoint to a coffee themed deck containing 3 slides of exactly what I'd asked for.

Was it the best presentation I've ever seen? Nah probably not, but was it a great start? yes absolutely. How much of that was down to the lazy prompting? probably most of it. However this goes to show that Claude can do this now.

I hurried over to my boss to show him how much time he can save, and as soon as he could find the time he'd asked me to set it up on his machine.

My boss, let's call him Rocky, spends a lot of his time building decks to distribute amongst our senior leadership team and executive committee. In fact he was working on one as we spoke, trying to extract some meaningful statistics about the process of an AB test towards the end of a major sales transform project.

Instead of spoon feeding Claude, I suggested he drop the Excel reports in the same folder as he wanted his presentation, and prompt Claude for exactly what he wanted. We spent maybe 30 minutes writing this incredibly detailed prompt, and hit that submit button.

Claude reasoned, it opened the Excel files, it built the story which we were trying to tell and then expertly generated our PowerPoint document. Upon review... it was okay, it had all the relevant information and was visually pleasing, however we then hit the snag of the corporate branding. So we figured we could drop the corporate template into the same folder and ask Claude to update our new pptx accordingly.

This is probably where we asked too much of a first generation release. It scanned the template and extracted a few colours whilst completely bypassing the corporate fonts and imagery. So we tried again, nudging Claude towards our desired output, calling out the corporate fonts by name, instructing it to extract the company logo, and dropping some images in, before long we hit Claude's usage limit and had to step away.

Honestly, it sounds like a bad experience, but it wasn't. The draft was great, and leaving Rocky to an hour of his own PowerPoint pixel-pushing got him to where he needed to be. Saving him anything from 2 to 3 hours.