The Deck You Don't Want to Make

It's Friday afternoon. You have a four-page strategy memo and a Monday board meeting, and someone needs that memo as slides. You paste the whole thing into Cowork and type "turn this into a slide deck." A few seconds later you have a real PowerPoint file: twenty-two slides, each a paragraph dropped onto a blank white template. Nobody can present from it. You spend Sunday rebuilding it by hand.

The deck wasn't bad because Cowork can't make slides. It can; it generates an actual downloadable .pptx, not a sketch. It was bad because you asked for "a deck," and a deck is not a thing. A board deck, a sales deck, and an internal status update share a file format and nothing else.

The fix is the one that fixes most of these jobs: describe the deliverable, not the format.

#A deck is an argument, not a reformat