Sick of Preparing Powerpoint Slides? I Finally Found the Perfect Hack

There's a particular species of corporate masochism that PowerPoint embodies, like watching your team stay within a few goals at 3 quarter-time of a Grand Final: technically you're still in the game, but everyone knows you're getting demolished. Slide after slide of misaligned text boxes, bullet points that align with a mind of their own, and that one image that refuses to sit flush with the margin no matter how many times you nudge it pixel by pixel.

I escaped this purgatory in 2017, trading the conference room for bành mì and the naive belief that running a takeaway shop meant never having to format another slide deck again. Foolish, really. Like thinking you can quit poker after one bad beat. The house always gets you back to the table.

And back I came, a few years later, to discover nothing had changed. The same monotonous presentations to prepare, the same Wednesday afternoons lost to slide 47 of a quarterly review that precisely nobody would read in full.

When the great post-ChatGPT AI gold rush began in 2023, I approached the parade of "revolutionary" presentation tools with the enthusiasm of a Carlton supporter in September — hopeful on principle, pessimistic from experience.

But 2025? Different game entirely. I've stumbled upon something that actually works, and I mean works in the way a well-timed bluff works — it makes you look considerably more competent than the cards you're actually holding.

The method is simple, which somehow makes it more satisfying. Open Word. Create a numbered list describing each slide you need, rough and unpolished. Include any data tables, key points of what you're trying to say. Don't agonize over elegance; this is prep work, not plating.

Copy the entire document into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini — whichever LLM you are currently favouring. Ask it to "configure this into structured prompts for a slide presentation."

Then, and this is where the magic happens, upload that file to gamma.app. Stand back. Watch it work. Enjoy.

The free version limits you to ten slides per presentation, which covers most internal meetings unless you work somewhere pathologically addicted to deck bloat. The paid tier costs ten dollars monthly — less than a decent parma, more valuable than most subscription services you're not actually using but keep forgetting to cancel.

I should clarify: gamma.app hasn't paid me to write this, though I wouldn't object if they did. This is simply the grudging acknowledgment of someone who's spent too many years in the PowerPoint trenches.

Will this advantage last? Probably not. Every edge gets found eventually, every tell gets spotted, every secret menu item becomes mainstream. But right now, while your colleagues are still manually adjusting bullet point indentation at 9pm on a Thursday, you are enjoying that winning feeling.