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Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure these plug-ins / skills are installed in your Cowork setup:

1. PPTX skill — creates, reads, and edits PowerPoint files directly in Cowork. Triggered automatically when you mention "presentation", "deck", or "slides". → Knowledge Work Plugins — PPTX (part of the standard plug-in pack)

2. Brand Voice skill — applies your brand guidelines (voice, colours, typography, messaging pillars) to all content. → Custom skill in .skills/skills/your-brand-voice

Both skills are detected automatically when Cowork starts, as long as they sit in the skills directory. The Brand Voice skill needs to be trained / filled in once so it knows your brand.

Step-by-step

Step 1 — Brief

Start a new Cowork session and describe what you need. Claude detects automatically that the PPTX and Brand Voice skills are relevant.

Example prompt:

"Create an 8-slide pitch-deck presentation about our new AI product. Use our Brand Voice and visual design."

Claude loads both skills and applies them in combination.

Step 2 — Brand Voice gets applied

The Brand Voice skill ensures every line on the slides follows brand guidelines:

• Voice: e.g. casual-technical, opinionated, clear & direct, substantive, real talk
• Messaging pillars: e.g. brand values, mission, vision
• Anti-hype filter: e.g. no empty superlatives, no clickbait, no "AI replaces everything"
• Language: e.g. German with "du", or English — depending on context

The skill checks every text against brand guidelines before it lands on a slide.

Step 3 — Visual design per brand identity

The Brand Voice skill also holds the visual identity that's applied to the deck:

• Primary colours: e.g. Red (#FF0000), Black (#000000), White (#FFFFFF), Grey (#F5F5F5)
• Accent colour pairs: e.g. Cyan + Purple, Violet + Blue, Green + Ultra — always used in pairs
• Typography: e.g. Mona Sans Bold for headlines, Playfair Display for creative accents
• Image style: neon lighting on dark backgrounds, cinematic composition, no generic stock photos

Step 4 — The PPTX skill builds the file

The PPTX skill handles the technical side of the deck. It has three modes:

Build from scratch — uses PptxGenJS to create slides from zero. Ideal when no template exists.

Edit a template — analyses an existing template (e.g. your company template), unzips it, edits content, and re-zips.

Extract content — reads existing .pptx files, e.g. to pull text for a rewrite.

The skill automatically applies design principles: no boring text-only slides, varied layouts (two-column, icon rows, grids, half-bleed images), large stat callouts, and visual elements on every slide.

Step 5 — QA

After creation, the deck goes through an automatic QA process:

1. Content QA — text is extracted and checked for completeness, order, typos
2. Visual QA — slides are converted to images and visually inspected (overlaps, text overflow, contrast, spacing)
3. Brand review — final check against the Brand Voice guidelines: is the tone right? Are the colours correct? Any forbidden phrases?

Claude uses a sub-agent with "fresh eyes" for the visual check.

Step 6 — Iterate

After QA you can give feedback:

• "Slide 3 needs more substance — add concrete numbers"
• "The headline on slide 5 feels generic, make it more opinionated"
• "Swap the colours on slide 2 for the Cyan + Purple pair"

Claude reworks only the affected slides and runs QA again.

Step 7 — Export & delivery

The finished .pptx is saved in your workspace folder and given to you as a download link. Open it directly in PowerPoint or Google Slides.

Tips for the best results

Be specific in the brief — the more detail on audience, occasion, and content, the better the result.

Reference the pillars — tell Claude which messaging pillar should anchor things (e.g. "focus on Craft Over Output").

Use templates when possible — an existing .pptx template as a starting point gives more consistent results than starting from zero.

Give iterative feedback — the first version is rarely perfect. 2–3 feedback rounds polish it.

Reference: skills & plug-ins used

Skill	Purpose	Trigger words
PPTX	Create, read, edit .pptx files	"presentation", "deck", "slides", ".pptx"
Brand Voice	Apply brand guidelines to text and design	"Brand Voice", "on-brand", "[company name]"
Document Formatting (via PPTX)	Layout, typography, colour scheme, visual elements	Used automatically by the PPTX skill

The skills are part of the Cowork setup and live under .skills/skills/. Plug-ins like the Knowledge Work Plugin (which bundles PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, PDF) can be installed from the plug-in marketplace.