The Markdown Presentation Workflow That Replaced My PowerPoint

I have not opened PowerPoint to start a deck from scratch in months. Not out of principle, just because the other way got faster and I never went back.

What the workflow actually is

I open my editor, same one I write code in, and start a .slaide file. Headings are slides, bullets are bullets, a short YAML block at the top sets the theme. No mouse, no clicking “new slide,” no dragging a text box to the spot where the last slide had one.

theme:
  palette: ink
  font: IBM Plex Sans

# Q3 numbers
MRR up 12%, churn flat at 2.1%.

# What changed
- Shipped the new onboarding flow
- Cut trial length from 14 days to 7
- Trial-to-paid conversion up 4pts

Then I render it:

slaide render deck.slaide --out deck.pdf

and look at the PDF. If a slide is wrong I fix the text, not the layout, because there mostly isn’t a layout to fight. That loop, write a line, render, look, is maybe ten seconds end to end once the file is open. Compare that to PowerPoint’s loop of click text box, click again to enter it, type, click away, notice the box didn’t resize, fix the box.

What’s actually good about it

The deck is a text file, so it lives in the same repo as everything else I’m working on, gets reviewed the same way, and shows up in git log when I want to know what I said in a customer call three months ago. I have gone back to old decks by grepping a repo for a client name, which is not a sentence I could have said with a folder full of .pptx files.

It’s also fast in a way that compounds. A ten-slide status deck takes me under five minutes because there’s nothing to design. The theme is picked once and every slide inherits it, so I’m never nudging a font size on slide 7 because it looked different from slide 6.

What still needs PowerPoint

Honest limit: when someone on the other side needs to edit the deck themselves and doesn’t know what a .slaide file is, which is most people, I export.

slaide render deck.slaide --out deck.pptx

The export gives real text boxes and real shapes, not a picture of the slide pasted onto a blank one, so it opens normally and edits normally in PowerPoint. That part works well for content-heavy decks, which is most of what I make.

Where it doesn’t work well: anything with heavy manual design. If a slide has hand-placed decorative shapes, custom animations, a background image bled to the exact edge with three overlapping elements, the round trip out to .pptx flattens some of that. I’ve stopped fighting it. For that kind of slide I either accept the simpler layout or, rarely, build that one slide by hand in PowerPoint and drop the rest of the deck around it.

The WYSIWYG editor exists too, and it’s free for signed-in users now, but I mostly don’t use it. Not because it’s bad, I just find the text file faster once I know the shape of what I’m writing. It’s there for the times I want to see the deck while I build it rather than after.

Who this is actually for

If your decks are mostly content, and you already live in an editor and a terminal for everything else, the text workflow removes a genuine amount of friction. If your job is designing decks, bespoke layouts, custom illustration per slide, this isn’t going to replace what you do and I wouldn’t try to sell it to you as if it would.

For me it replaced maybe fifteen decks a year that used to eat an afternoon each and now eat twenty minutes. That’s the whole pitch, really. Less time between having the sentence and having the slide.