Your AI Isn't Bad at Slides. You're Asking for the Wrong Format

Slide decks are a real part of my work. I have made hundreds or maybe even thousands of them for project updates, board reviews, client proposals and training sessions. Across many years, many roles, many companies. Slides are still one of the primary deliverables for a large number of knowledge workers. And I am one of them. When AI arrived, I spent months trying to figure out how to get it to reliably produce something I would actually want to present. Most of us for sure had this experience. You ask an AI assistant to create a presentation, a project update, a board summary, and the result is actually disappointing in a familiar way.

Sometimes you get a bullet outline, sometimes the assistant produces a file that technically opens, but the layout looks like something from the 90s. So this is a real example. I asked DeepSeek to create a nice PowerPoint about AI news. What I got was a very good text outline, no slides and nothing visual. PowerPoint is a surprisingly difficult file to produce from scratch. It is not a text file you can open in any editor. It is a compressed package of shapes, layouts, relationships, images, XML and a set of conventions that were designed for human editors and not for a chat assistant to generate directly.

HTML is different. HTML is the language of the web. Every AI model, from the largest frontier models to the free open-source versions, has been trained on enormous amounts of it. So this is the same example we did before with DeepSeek. But now I asked DeepSeek to produce HTML slides instead. This is the real result from the free version of DeepSeek. No subscription, no frontier model. The difference is not the AI. It is the format you are asking for. You need to ask for HTML. But here is the important detail.

You should ask not for any HTML. You want HTML that behaves like a real slide deck: 16 to 9 format, printable into PDF cleanly and structured well enough to convert into PowerPoint later without losing everything. Getting all of that reliably from a prompt is not a trivial task. I spent weeks trying to find the best instruction, which from the first shot produces exactly that. And it resulted in the tool called unPaper, which compresses these weeks into a couple of clicks for you to configure the format of your deck and just copy the prompt to later use it with your AI assistant.

Let me show you the full workflow. Imagine that you are managing a coffee shop in the center of Berlin and you would like to present the results of 2025 to the owners of the business. So what would you normally do? You would create a slide deck, potentially in PowerPoint, but today we'll be creating the slide deck with an AI assistant and with unPaper. First of all, we go to the chat assistant of your choice. Here I would use Gemini. I go to AI Studio here. You can use it for free.

So in the playground, in the chat, first of all I need to brainstorm the content of my slide deck. Here I would do a simple thing. I would ask it to invent some numbers and figures and the outline of the slide deck for the Kiez Coffee. I'm saying that I'm presenting the results to the business owners, that I'm the business manager, and I'm asking for a slide deck of around six to ten slides. Of course, in your situation, you will brainstorm slightly longer with the chat assistant.

And once you are happy with the outline of the slide deck, only after that will you create the slide deck. So let's do it. Let's paste this prompt and wait until the AI assistant creates an outline of the future slide deck. As you can see, it's done. It's an outline of the slide deck. It has part one, executive summary, financial and operational metrics and so on. So the outline is created and my assistant now knows what it would put on each of the slides. So what do we do at the next stage?

We go to unpaper.ai and you will see this screen, which has two types of tools: to make the slides and to convert the decks into PowerPoint. We go to make slides and create a deck. You will see here that the main thing unPaper is doing is actually helping you create the prompt with the instruction to your AI assistant to create a nice slide deck based on the information it has brainstormed. So what we can do is just press copy the prompt and the prompt will be copied.

The prompt will produce approximately this slide deck. If you would like to change something, if you would like to change the look and say that, let's say, it should not be white, it should be in dark colors, you can change other things too, like it should potentially not be a standard slide deck, but a consulting slide deck, a design slide deck or something else. You can play with all the things here. You can choose the look. You can choose, let's say, a white background or a gradient background or some dots or a grid.

So there are different types of options we can choose here, and you can even add a brief. For instance, you can say which audience will be looking at your slide deck, which language, what to include, what not to include, which topic and so on. So you describe all of it here, but again, this is optional. The only thing you really need to do is go to unpaper.ai, go to this tool and then press copy the prompt. Once the prompt is copied, we go back to our chat assistant and we just paste this prompt here.

The chat assistant will start thinking, and I actually recommend you, if you have Copilot at work, use GPT 5.5 or whatever GPT version from OpenAI is available. The most important thing is that it's working not only with the frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic and other companies, it also works with GLM, DeepSeek, Mistral and other types of models, which may be not as strong as frontier models. So we can expand the view and you can see that it was brainstorming. And now from here, it started to create the actual HTML code.

You don't need to know HTML to use this format. It will just generate this content in HTML code and then we will be able to download this file and open it in the browser. And if it's not offering you to download the file, you can copy the text into the clipboard. You can go back to unPaper and here at the bottom, you can see 'Got code instead of file'. So you just press it here and paste the HTML code here and you will then be able to save the HTML from this user interface.

So it's almost over. It's writing the final script. And once we see the closing HTML tag, it means that the file is generated and now we can just download it. So let's download it and open it. As you can see, it has generated the result. The result, I think, is quite good. As you can see, it has even generated charts and tables. We can also, by the way, choose a different format if we want. But this was the format which we asked for. If you want to print it into PDF, you can press save PDF.

I'm currently in Chrome. You can see that it will be able to print this presentation into a pixel-perfect PDF. Now the HTML is ready, but it may be not enough. You could present directly from the browser, share that file or print a clean PDF. But sometimes someone will ask for PowerPoint. And here we switch to the second part of the unPaper workflow, conversion into PowerPoint. If you would like to convert this HTML slide deck into PowerPoint, you can again do it with unPaper. If you go to unPaper, then here you can choose HTML to PowerPoint, or you can just press here, Convert HTML to PowerPoint.

You just need to either paste the HTML code here or upload, say drag and drop, the file here. You can see that this is our file which we have just seen. And the only thing you need to do is press convert. Let's open this file now. So this is the slide deck. As you can see, you can modify things, you can rearrange things. You can also see that these cards, for instance, are not just screenshots, these are real cards and this is real text which you can change.

Another important thing is that, for instance, the pie charts and the tables are native PowerPoint objects. What does that mean? It's actually a table. So you can resize the table, you can apply formats, and the pie chart: if you right-click on it, you can edit the data in Excel. So Excel will open now and you can modify the data in Excel. So eight slides, different cards, even different elements like these logos, you can take them, you can resize them. You see, it's pixel perfect. These are vector shapes.

It's actually quite cool. Watch what kind of PowerPoint you get. This is not a screenshot deck. The text is editable. The boxes move. You can rearrange slides, resize elements, add new content and send it to a colleague who can keep working with the file. And notice the direction. You do not start in PowerPoint. You end there, and only if you need to. But there is one more thing worth addressing, especially if you're making slides for work. Inside companies, the question is not only can I make nice slides.

The question is also where does my content go? Most tools available on the market which create PowerPoint work in one of two ways. Either they generate your slides on their servers directly and then convert them into PowerPoint, so your content will not just be travelling to their servers, it will actually be created there. Or they ask you to upload your file for conversion, so your finished file is also leaving your machine. Here's how the unPaper workflow is different. In the first step, unPaper helps you create an instruction prompt, which contains a description of the format you expect your model to answer in.

You just copy the prompt, so you do not send anything outside of your secure environment here. Then you proceed to the next step, to your AI. Here, I assume you are using the approved AI at work, or AI which you would use anyway, with or without unPaper. Your AI model generates the HTML file. So here your information is shared only with your approved AI. In the last step, you use the unPaper converter from HTML to PowerPoint. The architectural decision here was deliberate. All conversion happens client side.

All the conversion code and libraries are running inside your browser, on your machine. The resulting PowerPoint file is created by your machine and is saved locally. So nothing is leaving your secure environment at this stage either. You do not have to take my word for it. You can open the converter page, disconnect from Wi-Fi, drag the HTML file into the converter and press convert. As you can see, every step completes. The file appears locally. If you are technical enough, you can also monitor network requests in the developer tools in the browser.

No internet is required for this tool to work. This is the simplest proof for the privacy check you need to have. So the workflow is simple. Ask your AI for HTML, not for PowerPoint. Use the HTML directly if that is enough. Present from the browser or print to PDF and then send it by email. Convert to PowerPoint only when someone specifically needs that format or you prefer making edits in PowerPoint yourself. The AI you already have at work, whatever your company approved, can produce slides you are not embarrassed to show.

It just needs the right format and the right prompt. unPaper is free to use. It runs in the browser and the links are provided in the description. If you try it, please leave a comment, especially if something doesn't work the way you expected or if there is a feature you wanted it to support. The tool is still evolving and feedback is how it gets better. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.