Empower Your Next Google Slide Presentation with ChatGPT

Every day brings a new Large Language Model or plugin to uncover its potential. And with it, the landscape of potential use cases expands every day. This tutorial is very much trying to focus on a single use case that many of us can hopefully benefit from: The creation of the draft for a presentation in Power Point or Google Slide presentation, with limited user input.

Prerequisites
You need a chatGPT account (https://chat.openai.com/) and Google email.
Use GPT 4 model if possible.
No need for any VBA or Google App Script experience.

Let’s get started
Open chatGPT. As of the day of today, chatGPT cannot generate power point files. So, the trick we are going to use is to ask it to generate a Google App Script, that we’ll then execute in Google Slide to create the presentation.

Creating the prompt

Step 1: First pass
#Prompt: Write a google apps script for a google slides presentation about the blobfish. Populate all the data in the slides from your own knowledge, no placeholders. I need 5 slides.

Step 2: Define all text strings as variables so it’s easier to edit.
Prompt: Write a google apps script for a google slides presentation about the blobfish. Populate all the data in the slides from your own knowledge, no placeholders. I need 5 slides. Make sure that all the text strings are defined as variables at the beginning of the code in a json like format. Remove all the comments.

You can try Regenerate the code to see if you get more appealing code. It is to be noticed that chatGPT (not GPT) will limit the volume of text generated, hence, larger presentations will require multiple prompts.
If the code generated creates an error, simply ask chatGPT to ‘correct the code above’

Executing the script

Go to Google Drive and create a new empty Google Slide. Open the Apps Script Editor via the Extension menu.

Replace the placeholder with the chatGPT’s generated script. Save and Run it. The first time you run it, you will be asked to confirm that you understand the risks of running a script that can edit your files. “Google hasn’t verified this app”. Click Advanced, then Go to project (unsafe).

Now, go to the root of Google Drive and you will see a new file. And voilà!

Of course, this is fairly raw but can be styled quickly.

Level up!

Here are a few experiments you can try to get it further:

Add a bit of diversity in the layouts.
# Prompt: Use the predefined layout TITLE for the first slide, TITLE_AND_TWO_COLUMNS for all the other slides.

Provide an outline for the presentation
# Prompt: Use this outline to structure the presentation: Cover, Summary, Get ready, …

As an alternative, if you were to know the content of the presentation already, you could ask chatGPT to create a local html form which could then, help you generate the json object used in the Apple Script.
# Prompt: I want to create an html and javascript page that is composed of a form with textfields which allows a user to fill in values for a json file. I want the user to be able to save these values into a json file when pressing save. The json file looks like this: var data = { “title”: “The Blobfish: An Unusual Creature”, “slide1_title”: “What is a Blobfish?”,}; Make sure to use all the variables in the json file.

Learnings

This experiment was a fun way to learn more about the potential and limitations of chatGPT. Here are 3 key learnings:

1. It’s quite empowering. It enables someone with zero knowledge of Google App Scripts to generate and refine usable code.
2. Get ready to do and re-do. Mastering the Art of Prompts is part of the game when starting playing with chatGPT.
3. Use GPT, not chatGPT. The current limitations of chatGPT can be constraining at times. E.g. MaxVolume of content as an input and output. I will definitely explore taping directly into the openAI API to circumvent these.

©Thanks to Sunder Muthukumaran for the header visual.