Here’s a quick tip to boost your productivity by letting ChatGPT and VBA do the heavy lifting when creating PowerPoint slide decks.
If you don’t know what VBA is, no worries. It stands for Visual Basic for Applications and is integrated into all Microsoft Office applications, including PowerPoint. And no, you don’t have to be a programmer to make this work for you. Your existing copy/paste skills will do just fine…
Let me show you.
Here are the specific steps to take to boost your productivity when creating PowerPoint slide decks:
Visit ChatGPT and prompt it to write an outline for a PowerPoint presentation. Let’s pretend we want a pitch deck with maximum seven slides to present SmartPet Buddy, a fictitious robotic companion for pets.
The ChatGPT prompt could look like this:
You are an entrepreneur who invented SmartPet Buddy: A robotic companion for pets that offers interactive play, exercise, and monitoring, keeping pets entertained and active even when their owners are away. Real fun for your the whole family...including your best friends.
Write the outline for a slide deck to pitch this amazing product to prospective customers. Tell them about how exciting their lives will be with SmartPet Buddy in the house. Focus on the benefits more so than the features.
Tell your audience what the product does for them and what it means to them in their life rather than what it is by listing feature after feature.
Use no more than 7 slides in this deck.
ChatGPT will then produce the outline for this slide deck, just like we asked it to do.
If you like what ChatGPT presents to you, cool. Otherwise either hit the “Regenerate Response” button — or suggest what kind of modifications you want.
Once you are satisfied with the outline for your slide deck, it’s time to bring VBA into play. We are going to prompt ChatGPT to generate the required VBA code for PowerPoint from the outline:
Now write the VBA code to create the PowerPoint slides for this pitch. Add content that is humorous and whimsical to reflect just how fun the product is.
As always, ChatGPT, our skilled and willing digital assistant, will oblige and create a block of code for us. We can then copy this code and hop over to PowerPoint.
In PowerPoint, launch the Visual Basic Editor by pressing Alt-F11 or selecting Visual Basic Editor from the Tools/Macro menu.
Then, right click on the Project Panel and select Insert -> Module.
A new window will open. Paste the code you copied from ChatGPT into this window and then run the code by clicking on the ► icon.
And that’s it!
This piece of code has now created a new PowerPoint presentation with 7 slides with minimal text on each.
Now all that’s left is to make it pretty by using PowerPoint’s Designer feature:
The Designer is powered by AI as well and will read your slides and suggest a appropriate designs and images.
All you need to do is to select one of the designs you like. Then, fine-tune each slide to make sure your message will resonate with your audience — and voila… You have created a beautiful slide deck in no time.