Turning Meeting Notes Into a Slide Deck in Five Minutes
From the slaide example deck, rendered with slaide.

Turning Meeting Notes Into a Slide Deck in Five Minutes

I closed a client call last week with eleven bullet points in a text file and a 2pm deadline to send a recap deck. No design time, no slide-shuffling in PowerPoint. Just notes that needed to become something a client could open and skim in ninety seconds.

Here is exactly what I did, start to finish, in about five minutes.

The raw material

Meeting notes are messy by nature. Mine looked like this:

  • migration to new payment provider, go-live Sept 15
  • three blockers: webhook retries, currency rounding, sandbox creds still pending from their side
  • QA plan: two weeks parallel run before cutover
  • rollback plan exists, tested once
  • open question: who owns Sunday on-call during cutover week

Eleven lines, no structure, half of it fragments. That is the input. I am not cleaning this up by hand.

Adding structure constraints

The trick is not asking an agent to “make a deck from these notes.” That gets you a wall of text on every slide. Instead I give it constraints up front, in the prompt:

  • One idea per slide, max four bullets each
  • Title slide, then problem, then timeline, then risks, then next steps
  • Close with an explicit ask (in my case: confirm on-call owner by Friday)

That is the whole brief. Because I write my decks in Slaide - a plain-text slide format, Markdown for the words plus a small YAML block for the theme - the agent does not drive a slide editor GUI or fight with placeholder boxes. It writes a .slaide file directly, the same way it would write a config file. There is an Agent Skill for this, so the file comes out already close to correct: proper section breaks, one thought per slide, no walls of text.

Rendering and the first look

.slaide renders three ways from the same source: a web deck, a PDF, and an editable .pptx. I ran the render and had the web version open in about ten seconds. This step matters because a text file that looks fine as text can still render as a cramped slide - long words wrap badly, a five-item list overflows the frame. You have to look at the actual deck, not just the source.

Mine rendered clean except for one thing: the risks slide had four bullets and the fourth one (“sandbox creds pending from their side”) ran two lines and pushed past the safe margin. Text files do not know how their own words will wrap.

Fixing what the agent got wrong

Three fixes, all small:

  • Shortened the overflowing bullet to “sandbox creds pending (their side)”
  • The agent had put “rollback plan exists, tested once” and “QA plan: two weeks parallel run” on the same slide - split into two, one per idea, matching my own constraint that it had ignored on that one slide
  • Swapped the accent color in the theme block from the default blue to a neutral gray, because this was going to a client who already associates blue with a competitor of theirs (an odd but real thing you learn after a few of these calls)

That last one is a one-line edit in the YAML theme block, not a redesign. The editor is free once you sign in, so for anything more visual than a color swap I would have opened it there instead of hand-editing YAML. For three small fixes, editing the source directly was faster.

One honest limitation here: if a deck has hand-placed decoration or custom animation, none of that survives export cleanly through the .pptx round trip - it flattens on import. Mine did not have any, so it was not a problem, but it is worth knowing before you build something fancy and try to hand it to a client in PowerPoint.

Export and send

Rendered again, exported to PDF for the quick look, and to .pptx in case the client wanted to add their own slide before the Sept 15 go-live review. Both came out of the same source file - I did not touch two different tools to get two different formats.

Total time from raw notes to a deck in the client’s inbox: about five minutes, most of which was me rereading it once before hitting send.

Why this beats the usual approach

The old way was: open PowerPoint, pick a template, retype the same eleven points into text boxes, fight the auto-layout when a bullet is too long, then export. Twenty minutes on a good day, plus the temptation to “just polish it a bit” that eats another ten.

The new way skips the template-picking and the box-fighting because there are no boxes - it is text with a theme, and the theme is three lines of YAML I can reuse on every recap deck I send this client. Next meeting, same theme, same structure, new notes. The five minutes gets shorter each time.

If you run your own coding agent already, this costs nothing beyond the time you spend rereading before you hit send - the Agent Skill and MCP server that let an agent author .slaide files directly are part of the open core. The paid hosted generation exists for people who would rather skip running their own agent, but that was never the part doing the actual work here.

I still keep a slide or two of client meeting notes as fragments in a drawer file, in case a deck needs redoing at 8pm before a 9am call. Some things a five-minute workflow does not fix, and that is fine.