Why this skill exists
Doc-to-deck is one of the few Copilot tricks that’s actually load-bearing — the model is legitimately good at restructuring a 12-page document into slides. The problem is what it does unsupervised: paragraph-bullets nobody will read aloud, a topic label where a title should be, three ideas crammed onto one slide, and AI-generated imagery that announces “nobody senior looked at this” from across the room.
None of that is a model limitation. It’s a missing procedure. Presentation craft has known rules — assertion titles, one idea per slide, detail in the notes, ruthless word budgets — and a SKILL.md is exactly the place to make them non-negotiable.
The step that does the most work: three narrative arcs, proposed before any slide exists. Most bad decks were doomed at the structure level, and no amount of slide polish fixes a deck that’s just the source doc’s chapter order wearing a costume. Choosing the arc is the one decision the skill refuses to make for you.
What it does, step by step
- Reads your source — Word doc, rough deck, or notes — and confirms audience, desired outcome, and time slot. Missing any of the three? It asks instead of assuming.
- Proposes 3 narrative arcs, each a one-line spine plus section headers, all buildable from your actual material. You pick or blend. It will not proceed without this.
- Builds a skeleton — every title a full assertion (“Churn doubled after the pricing change”, never “Churn Update”), every slide carrying exactly one idea. You approve before writing starts.
- Writes the slides — max 4 bullets, max 8 words each; everything else flows to speaker notes; data as tables or one big number; visuals as labeled placeholders, never generated images.
- Saves a PPTX to your OneDrive Cowork output folder and reports what it left out and why. It never sends or shares — you apply the corporate template in PowerPoint and own the final.
Install (60 seconds)
- Download the SKILL.md above.
- In OneDrive, create the folder
/Documents/Cowork/skills/deck-doctor/. - Drop SKILL.md inside — “Deck Doctor” appears as a chip in Cowork’s side panel next conversation.
- Say: “Run Deck Doctor on [your document].”
Make it yours (5 minutes, recommended)
- The word budgets — 8 words per bullet and 4 bullets per slide are our defaults. Tighten them; never loosen past 10 and 5 or you’ve rebuilt the problem.
- The arc shapes — Step 2 lists example spines. Replace them with the structures your org actually responds to (every company has one pitch shape leadership trusts).
- The output folder and naming — point it at your team’s deck library if that’s where drafts live.
- Add a companion file — drop your team’s slide style notes in the skill folder alongside SKILL.md (skills support up to 20 companion files) and reference it from the STYLE section.
Failure modes we’ve already handled
| What goes wrong | How the skill handles it |
|---|---|
| Slides become the document, re-pasted | Hard budget: 8-word bullets, one idea per slide; depth lives in speaker notes |
| It picks a structure and runs with it | Three-arc proposal is mandatory and unskippable, even when you’re rushed |
| AI images make the deck look auto-generated | Forbidden outright; visuals become labeled placeholders you fill with real assets |
| Missing facts get papered over with plausible filler | Anti-fabrication rule: gaps are marked [NEEDS INPUT] on the slide |
| It mails the draft to your team | Never shares; PPTX lands in OneDrive for your review only |
The bigger idea
The deck is the last document most organizations still judge people on, which is exactly why “Copilot made my slides” is either a superpower or a career hazard depending entirely on the procedure behind it. Encode the craft once, in writing, and the doc-to-deck shortcut stops being a quality gamble. The arc decision stays human. That’s the right division of labor.