Create a deck

Use this when you are starting from an idea rather than an existing file.

Three ways to start

Create slides opens on three doors. Pick the one that fits:

• General prompt — the fastest, like "I'm feeling lucky". A short prompt with no example slides: your AI designs the slides its own way, under a few rules that keep the result printable and convertible. You rely on your AI, and set nothing. Copy it right there.
• Custom prompt — the most control. Slide layouts made by the unPaper team teach your AI to build polished slides that open cleanly in PowerPoint. You set the look: surface, accent, background, type, header and footer, or your brand kit. No storyline: your AI picks the layouts your topic needs.
• Templates — a custom prompt with a storyline. A complete, realistic deck for your topic; your AI follows its structure and look and writes your content. See Templates for all of them.

Steps

1. Pick a start. A template or a layout set opens the studio.
2. Look at what your AI will receive. The studio shows every slide the prompt carries, in order, beside one panel: the deck size (Compact, about 15 example slides; Standard, about 24; Extended, about 40 for a strong model with a long context), the look — a model's own style and the surface — and Customise the look for the accent, background, type, header and footer. Every size has two free slides where your AI designs something of its own.
3. Talk the topic through with your AI first and ask it for a slide-by-slide outline in plain text. Then press Copy prompt and paste it into the same chat. View prompt shows the exact text, can copy it in parts for an assistant that takes only short messages, and lists what the prompt asks for.
4. Bring the reply back. The studio's panel takes the file or the pasted reply; so does AI reply in the header on every page. The deck opens in the editor, processed on your device.

What you end up with

One self-contained unPaper HTML file: styles, layout rules and print setup inside it. No assets folder, no network requests, nothing to break when you email it. From the editor it exports to PowerPoint and PDF.

Gotchas

• Ask for a downloadable file. The prompt already does, but some assistants still answer in a code block. That is fine — use Paste the AI reply.
• One idea per slide. The prompt sets word and bullet budgets on purpose. If you loosen them in your brief, expect crowded slides.
• The prompt is too long for some assistants. Copilot and a few others cap the length of a single message and refuse the paste. Under the copy button, Prompt too long to paste? saves the same prompt as a .txt — attach that file and ask for a deck in the format it describes.
• Long decks drift. Past roughly 20 slides most models start forgetting the format. Generate in two passes and splice with Update a deck.
• Weaker models benefit most. The template carries the design, so a small or local model produces a deck that looks like the same product as a frontier one.