Editing presentations

Presentations can not only be created from scratch but also reworked from an existing deck. You upload the .pptx file into the chat, the agent reads the slides together with their layout and changes exactly what you name. Design, font and logo of the original are preserved.

The workflow

1. Upload the presentation. The file is attached to the message; the upload runs in the background.
2. Ask for a review. A good start is a question rather than an instruction, for example “Does the agenda match the content?”. The agent reads the deck and answers with an assessment.
3. Approve the change. Only then comes the instruction – something like “Adjust the agenda.” The agent returns the reworked file as a download.
4. Ask for content improvements. Asked how the content could be improved, the agent answers with a list of suggestions that you can adopt individually or as a whole.

In the example a training presentation grows this way from an agenda with four items to a deck of 22 slides, extended by “Prompt engineering: before and after”, a hands-on exercise, the key takeaways and an outlook.

Before larger changes: raise the step limit

Rebuilding a whole presentation consists of many individual tool calls – read slide, set fields, append slides, check result. The default value for the maximum agent steps is not sufficient for that.

Note

Raise Advanced → maximum agent steps before the request – to 100 in the recording. If the agent hits the limit it stops mid-way and the presentation is left half-finished. See Setting up the agent.

What the agent corrects on its own

During extensive rebuilds the agent works partly in parallel and notices itself when something gets lost. In the recording it reports two such cases and fixes them:

• Some of the changes are not accepted by the tool because of an overly strict field format – the agent repeats them in the accepted format (multi-line text fields).
• Some changes are lost through concurrent write access – the agent then corrects the affected slides one after another.

Both happen without intervention, but they lengthen the run. That is another reason to set the step limit generously beforehand.

Limits

Caution

Text fields with an image underneath them cannot be processed by companyFILES. Those slides have to be finished by hand after the edit.

Beyond that the same applies as elsewhere: the result is a very advanced draft, not a finished presentation. Individual slides still need work on wording and arrangement afterwards. The value lies in the groundwork – structure, content and design are in place, consistently in the design of the original file.

Templates as a starting point

Instead of an uploaded file, a stored PowerPoint template can serve as the starting point. It then lives permanently in companyFILES and does not have to be attached every time – see Templates.

Next: Templates.