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Comment by ctward | Hacker News Reader

i've been struggling a lot with my team to standardize our presentation systems. as soon as we got claude people just started making adhoc, non-standard, slides. This is good because they're 10x better than the bullshit one offs PMs used to make. But as a result we've got 80 different ways of conveying the same type of information to our leadership. And its pissing those leaders off.

Getting people aligned on a single template is our biggest headache for the ops side of the house. Will definitely need to research this further. Thanks for the post.

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You might find my open source project SmallDocs useful. It lets Claude make presentations in Markdown which can be exported to PPT. You can define styles and make them defaults. (You can also share the native SmallDoc presentations by just sending a url.)

Homepage: https://smalldocs.org/

Example presentations:

https://smalldocs.org/s/mTBw58ut_eTAIlGkYePw6-#k=4MotlKf-sLc...

https://smalldocs.org/s/cGRzzCv7LA9Kd8BxZ4bBAP#k=B7_NNXPbpLw...

Code: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

It doesnt help that PowerPoint itself has a truly horrible templating system. Try building a template from scratch and you'll see the ur-template has about 8 styles which are themselves very fragile and whose objects carry different degrees of semantic meaning. This is why, for example, it's stupidly difficult to take a deck produced in one template, paste it into another, and have the new template take effect across the copied slides.

PowerPoint has quite a lot of deep features, and you'll prise it out of my cold dead hands, but the template system is a horror show.

An interesting bit of schadenfreude, How does management feel when you try and communicate with them via AI?

In my experience communication via LLM is easily the worst part of them, it feels absolutely miserable to receive that big blob of machine generated fluff. This is especially interesting due to the duality present, it feels pretty great to run them, just sit there and let the machine handle the fluff while you handle the big picture.

Anyhow, usually the flow is the reverse, the boss gives you that big ball of machine fluff and you just have to sit there and take it, fun seeing it go the other way, but seeing as they are in charge I would not be surprised to see directives along the lines of "use more AI it makes you more productive, but don't use it with my reports"

> Getting people aligned on a single template is our biggest headache

I’m of the opinion that this is one of those things where the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It’s a lot of work. And for what? There is no tangible benefit to having presentation look the same.

It might even be value negative. When I watch back to back presentations, having each presenter present in their own unique style makes the experience more interesting and helps keep me engaged.

Oh man the masters and layout proliferation is the biggest pain.

If you can, I'd do a bare bones starting template with like Cover, section divider, and title only layouts. Lock in slide dimensions, fonts, colors. Then ask (and pray) people upload that instead of letting Claude work from scratch.

Even if everyone goes in a different direction, it's much easier to merge and conform styles if you're working on the same template with minimal placeholders.

Ideally you get a library of "best practice" slides that people use as a starting point, but realistically people love doing their thing. Key is to set yourself up for an easy cleanup.

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