Build the deck

Most people start here. They open a tool, type a topic, and accept whatever comes out. That is why so many decks look related to each other and land with nobody.

By putting the build fifth, everything the tool generates has something to be judged against: a thesis it either supports or does not, headlines that either state a message or do not, figures that either trace to a source or come off the slide. The tool becomes a typist rather than an author, which is the only role it is actually good at.

Microsoft's PowerPoint FAQ lists the features that require a separate Microsoft Designer licence: adding a slide, creating a presentation about a specific topic, creating a presentation from a file, organizing the presentation, and adding an image.

Without it you still get, again in Microsoft's wording, "summarization, open-ended Q and A prompting, and basic chat features". Which is to say: the half of Copilot that reads your deck works, and the half that writes it does not.

On the 2,000-character ceiling and the missing iterative edit, Microsoft's own support specialist called the concerns valid and offered workarounds rather than a fix: draft in Word first, break the content into structured outlines, then bring it across. Which is session 2's advice, arrived at from the other direction.

Generally available to Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans. It reads the slide master, layouts, fonts and colour scheme, makes pinpoint edits to a single slide without regenerating the deck, and produces native PowerPoint charts, described in the docs as "visuals you can edit directly, not static images". That last point matters: an editable chart survives a reviewer, a picture of a chart does not.

Where it will not run, and this list is specific: PowerPoint 2016 or 2019 perpetual and volume licence, PowerPoint on iPad, PowerPoint on Android, and Microsoft 365 builds older than 16.0.13127.20296 on Windows or 16.46 on Mac. The web version works.

And one security line that applies to every deck you build from someone else's template: "Only use Claude for PowerPoint with trusted files." Files from external sources can contain hidden instructions. Testing has identified scenarios where the add-in can be manipulated into extracting sensitive information or taking destructive actions if it is allowed to act without verification. A deck template from a conference organiser is an external file.

• Name your layouts clearly. "Title Slide", "Agenda Slide", "Chart Slide". Microsoft's own moderator guidance. A generator cannot choose a layout it cannot name.
• Save the template as .potx. Not a .pptx you copy each time. The template format is what makes the layouts addressable.
• Apply the template before generating. Anthropic's best practice for Claude for PowerPoint is worded almost identically: "Start with your template already applied before asking Claude to generate content", and "Verify that outputs match your organization's brand guidelines."

Microsoft also acknowledges that complex layout creation is not fully supported, with no roadmap or timeline given. So the honest position is: simple named layouts applied first will work, and an intricate bespoke master will still need hands on it.

Not cynicism. A thirty-second check, before you spend an evening learning something:

• Open the vendor's own site. Not a review, not a listicle, not a course description. The product page.
• Find a dated page. A changelog, a docs page with a last-updated stamp, a pricing page. If the freshest thing you can find is two years old, treat every feature claim as a claim.
• Treat any AI-tool course older than about a year as history. Not worthless, but not current. This course will need re-verifying too, which is why its source map carries a date on the front.

One honesty note on the Tome story: the widely-quoted shutdown date comes from secondary blogs, so this course does not state it. What it states is what was verified by opening the URLs: the 404, the founders' pivot, and the live course.