From Excel numbers to 5 meeting slides, no retyping

Numbers ready, slides needed

The numbers are ready, and now Mark's aunt needs five slides for the start-of-month staff meeting. In this last part, Claude builds the deck from the Excel results of part 2, and this is a real PowerPoint file it made.

SETUP

The same add-in

In PowerPoint, the add-in is part of the same Claude for Microsoft 365 package installed in part 2: go to Home, Add-ins and click Claude. Pick a slide template first, because Claude reads the slide master, the deck's layout template, to use the right fonts and colors.

FIVE SLIDES

Numbers straight from Excel

Ask Claude to use the results in the open Excel file to build five slides: overview, items going up, items going down, peak hours and recommendations. Every number on the slides comes straight from the summary table, with nothing retyped.

REAL CHARTS

Click to edit

The charts in the slides are real PowerPoint charts you can click to edit the numbers, not pasted images. The peak-hours slide shows that 5 pm to 8 pm brings in 42 percent of revenue.

EDIT ONE SLIDE

Only that slide changes

Slide 3 has five long lines, so ask for it to be cut to three, and only that slide changes while the others stay the same.

DIAGRAM

Bullets into a diagram

The recommendations slide is three bullet points, so ask Claude to turn it into a three-step process diagram, move it to the front and add a contents slide for the whole deck.

YOU CHECK

Check every number

The draft comes out fast, but you still check every number against the Excel file before presenting. Habits like one line per bullet go into the Instructions box once.

RECAP

Three places to work

So there are three places to work: Chrome for web tasks, Excel for numbers, PowerPoint for slides. All three need a paid plan, Pro or higher, and you're always the one who does the final check.