.png){kind=logo}
A friend who runs marketing at a mid-sized logistics software company sent me her Q3 review deck the evening before she presented it to the leadership team, with a one-line message: “does this make sense?” Twenty-three slides. Every one of them was a dashboard screenshot with a paragraph underneath, and the titles were labels: Paid Social Performance, Email Metrics, Webinar Summary, Pipeline Overview. The numbers were right; she had pulled them herself that afternoon.
Then she talked me through it, and the spoken version took four sentences. In July they had cut paid media spend by about a third. For six weeks pipeline looked shaky and the sales director started asking questions. The webinar programme picked up the slack, pipeline finished the quarter level with Q2 on a smaller budget, and she wanted to move the freed money into two more webinars a month, which was the whole story, and none of it appeared on any slide.
She rebuilt the deck that night in Quillbot’s AI Presentation Maker, with the original file attached and those four sentences as the prompt. The version she presented had nine slides, one chart that did the arguing, and the ask on the last slide in a single line.
Before any slide software opens, write the story in three lines. Situation: what was true at the start. Tension: what went wrong, or what could have. Resolution: what changed it, and what you want now. For a pitch or a budget request the same three lines come out as problem, evidence, ask. Each line of the spine gets at least one slide and no slide gets two lines. If a slide needs an “and also”, it is two slides.
A stock photo of a handshake beside the word “Partnerships” is decoration. A photo of your actual stand at a trade fair with a queue in front of it is evidence. A chart with five coloured lines is a dataset; the same chart with four lines in grey and one in your brand colour is a claim. The test for any visual is whether the slide loses an argument when you delete it. If it loses nothing, delete it.
People glance at the shape of a chart before they read a figure on it, so draw the shape first: a line that falls next to a line that holds, a target band with the actual line dipping below it and climbing back. Put the two numbers that matter directly on the chart. Give the slide a title that states the conclusion (“Pipeline held while spend fell”) rather than a label (“Pipeline Overview”), then check the whole deck by pasting only the titles into an email draft. If the email could be sent as it is, the deck has a spine. If it reads like a list of chapter headings, keep going.
“Q3 marketing review” is a topic. A generator given a topic returns the average of every Q3 marketing review it has seen: a title slide, an agenda, four slides called Channel Performance and a closing slide called Next Steps that could belong to any company on earth.
Quillbot’s AI Presentation Maker takes three kinds of input. The prompt carries the audience, the tone, the key points and the spine. Pasted material covers notes or an outline. Attach Files accepts PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx) and image files (PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP), and Quillbot’s ai presentation makerreads an attached report and builds slides from your figures and your wording rather than from a general idea of what a marketing review contains.
The prompt she used, lightly tidied (the company and its figures are a composite, so do not borrow the numbers):
Build a 9-slide Q3 marketing review for our leadership team: CEO, CFO and the sales director. Tone: direct, no hype. Attached: the Q3 marketing report (PDF) and last quarter’s deck (PPTX). The story: we cut paid media spend by roughly a third in July; pipeline tracked below plan for six weeks; the webinar programme sourced the missing opportunities and Q3 pipeline finished level with Q2 on a smaller budget. Key points: paid spend down, pipeline flat, webinar-sourced opportunities up, cost per opportunity down. Final slide: move the freed paid budget into two additional webinars a month for Q4. Write every slide title as a one-line conclusion. One idea per slide. Suggest a chart for every slide that carries a number.
What comes back is a set of slide titles with speaker-ready text under each, then a choice of AI-generated layouts, themes and design options. The tool can also suggest or generate charts, graphs and images to match the topic, so the spend-versus-pipeline slide arrives with a suggested line chart rather than a blank box.
Attaching last quarter’s deck as well as the report, which I would not have thought to do, gave the generator the company’s own vocabulary (what counts as an opportunity, which stages count as pipeline).
The slide-count selector is where the editing starts. Twenty-three slides of material asked to fit in nine forces the generator to merge and drop, and forces you to look at what it dropped and decide whether you agree.
Her first pass at nine lost the email metrics entirely, which annoyed her for about a minute, until she admitted nobody in that room had asked about email all year. They went into a two-slide appendix after the ask.
A habit I have picked up: generate once at eight slides and once at fourteen, present the eight-slide version to yourself, and notice which of the six extra slides you miss. Usually two. Those two go back in.
Slide six of the original deck, as she sent it to me:
Paid Social Performance Q3 Paid social spend was reduced in July as part of the budget reallocation exercise. Impressions declined in line with the reduction in spend. Cost per lead rose in August before stabilising in September. Webinar registrations from organic and email channels increased. Overall pipeline remained consistent with the previous quarter. Further optimisation of creative is planned for Q4.
The fifth bullet carries the whole quarter, phrased so flatly that nobody would notice.
The slide she presented:
We spent a third less on paid media and pipeline held [Chart: July to September. Paid media spend as a falling grey line. Total pipeline as a flat line in the brand colour, labelled with its value at each end.] Webinars sourced the difference. Next slide.
The headline is the claim. The chart shows the shape, one line going down and one not, and anyone who wants the figure can read it off the labels. “Further optimisation of creative is planned” got cut, it was a sentence written to fill the slide.
In Quillbot’s editor this is a matter of rewriting the title, deleting the bullets and keeping the suggested chart or dropping in your own export. Deciding what to cut took longer than cutting it.
Her final nine slides mapped onto the spine like this, give or take the title slide:
A product pitch runs on the same table with the beats renamed: the customer’s problem, shown with a real screenshot of the clumsy thing they do today; evidence, which is your product in use, a customer quote with a name attached, a before-and-after number you can defend; then the ask. Founders put their visual budget into the product slide and leave the problem slide as a bullet list. But the room has to believe the problem before the product means anything.
The generated draft is raw material; the editor is where the story gets its order. You can edit any section’s title and content, and reorder, delete or add sections, which matters because generators like to put results before the thing that produced them. Her draft had the webinar slide before the six-weeks-below-plan slide. Dragging the tension in front of the turn took ten seconds and turned a report into an argument.
Crop a screenshot to the part of the interface you are talking about rather than the whole window. Remove the background from a product shot so it sits on the theme instead of floating in a white rectangle. There are filters too, which I have never needed.
Collaboration runs in real time by email invite or a shared link, so the sales director can rewrite the ask slide himself rather than replying to an email with “see attached, v7_final_FINAL”.
Quillbot’s ppt maker exports to PPTX for whoever will present from PowerPoint and add notes there, to PDF in standard or print quality for the pre-read that goes out the day before, and to PNG or JPG for the one slide you want to paste into a chat thread so that people argue about the chart before the meeting rather than during it.
Speaker notes are not generated. The tool writes slide titles and speaker-ready text on the slides, and there is no separate notes track, so the spoken story (the four sentences, the sales director’s remark in August, the answer to the objection you expect from the CFO) gets written after export, in PowerPoint or wherever you present from. Notes written by a tool that has never met your CFO would be worse than no notes.
Animations and transitions are not generated either. Add them afterwards if you need a build on the stacked-bar slide, and consider not needing it.
Charts must be checked against the real numbers, every one, before the deck leaves your laptop. The step from a table in a PDF to a drawn line can round a figure or pick the wrong column. Where the chart and the source disagree, replace the chart with your own export and let the layout wrap around it.
Generated images can be generic, and in a work deck generic reads as careless. Swap them for the real thing: the actual product interface, a frame from the webinar recording, your team at the event, the customer’s warehouse if they will let you photograph it. Keep a generated image only where the slide needs a picture of a concept and no real one exists, and even then crop it hard so it reads as texture rather than scene.
The tool is labelled Beta on its product page, so the occasional layout comes out odd; pick a different one from the options rather than fighting it.
Prompting with a topic. Still the first thing I check when someone sends me a flat deck.
Attaching everything. A forty-page report, three spreadsheets and last year’s deck will produce a summary of the forty-page report. Attach the report, yes, but write the spine in the prompt so the generator knows which parts matter.
Reading the titles aloud. Once titles are full-sentence conclusions, the temptation is to read them word for word; the room reads faster than you speak and finishes before you do. Say something the slide does not say.
Twenty slides for a fifteen-minute slot. Nobody has ever complained that a review ended early.
Titles that label. “Pipeline Overview” is a filing category. “Pipeline held while spend fell” is something a CFO can disagree with, which is the point of putting it on a slide.
Can it rebuild a deck I already have? Yes. Attach the existing .pptx, put the spine and the slide count in the prompt, and treat the result as a second draft of your own material. Keep the original for the appendix slides.
Does it write speaker notes? No, only the on-slide text. Export to PPTX and add notes in PowerPoint.
Can I get the deck into Google Slides? Not as a direct export yet; the product page lists it as coming soon. Export PPTX and upload the file to Google Slides.
Is it free? The tool is free to use. A Premium plan adds unlimited presentations, faster generation and access to the rest of Quillbot’s tools.
Take the last deck you presented, the one you were not quite happy with. Write its spine in three lines before you open anything. Then attach the deck as a .pptx, paste the three lines as the prompt, set the slide count to eight, and put the result next to the original. The slides you miss belonged in it. The ones you do not miss were the archive.
Then swap whatever stock image came with the theme for a photograph of the real thing.