Turn a long report into a ten-minute presentation

When a long report has to become a short presentation, the usual moves are to give every chapter a slide and shrink the tables until nobody can read them, or to open a blank deck and stare at it. A report already holds an argument: what was found, why it matters, what should happen next. A ten-minute presentation is that argument with the evidence it needs and nothing else.

An AI assistant is quick at finding the argument in 40 pages and drafting an outline. It also crams too much onto each slide and changes numbers on the way, for example rounding 17% up to “nearly 20%” or adding up figures the report never added. So this method puts a report page next to every point, and you check each figure before it goes on a slide. Write the headline of every slide before you design any of them explains the storyline idea; this tutorial applies it to a report and takes it all the way to a finished deck.

By the end of this you’ll have a deck of six to ten slides with speaker notes, every number traced to a page of the report, rehearsed once and cut to fit ten minutes. Set aside about an hour.

It works for a manager presenting results to leadership, an engineer reporting on a project, a researcher briefing non-specialists, a nonprofit lead facing the board or a funder, or a public servant briefing an official. The steps are the same in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, with PowerPoint or Google Slides.

What you’ll be able to do

• Put the argument of a long report into three sentences you’d say out loud.
• Outline slides whose titles carry the message, with the report page behind every point.
• Build the deck in minutes, with charts made from the report’s own data.
• Finish today with a ten-minute deck that’s ready to present: every figure checked, rehearsed once with a timer.

What you need

• A report of 15 pages or more, as a PDF or Word file. For a first run, take a public one, such as your city’s annual report or a report your organization has already published. If the real one is confidential, check how your AI tool handles files first; Before you upload a client document lists what to look for.
• A chat assistant that lets you attach a PDF or paste text.
• PowerPoint or Google Slides, a timer, and an hour for the first deck.

Steps

1. Write down the room. Three lines: who will be there and what they already know, how long you have, and what you want them to decide at the end. For example, made up: “Audience: the library board, who know the homework-help program but haven’t read the evaluation. Time: ten minutes, then questions. Decision: fund the program at two more branches next year.” If you can’t write the last line, ask whoever invited you. For ten minutes, plan six to ten slides.

2. Get the argument in three sentences. Start a new conversation, attach the report and send prompt 1 (below). If you can’t attach it, paste the text in parts with a line such as --- Page 7 --- before each page, as in How to summarize a long contract. Rewrite the three sentences you get back until you’d say them to the board chair in a hallway; every slide that follows hangs on them. For the made-up library case, the edited version might read:

   Average weekly attendance at homework help rose 17% in its first year, at all three branches.
   The two branches without the program have the longest waiting lists for tutoring.
   We're asking the board to fund the program at those two branches next year.
   

3. Ask for the outline. In the same conversation, send prompt 2 with your edited sentences. Put every title through the title test (below): “Attendance” is a label, “Weekly attendance rose at all three branches” is a message. Cut any slide the three sentences don’t need.

4. Check every number against its page. Send prompt 3 for a list of every figure in the outline. Open the report, search for a few words of each quoted sentence and mark each figure Confirmed, Changed, Calculated or Not found. A made-up example of what turns up:

   Slide 2: "Attendance up nearly 20%"
     Report, p. 12: "average weekly attendance rose 17%"
     Changed: use 17%
   Slide 3: "1,240 students served"
     Report, p. 9: "1,240 students attended at least one session"
     Confirmed, but say "attended"
   Slide 4: "14 tutoring hours per student"
     Report: not stated
     Calculated: work it out yourself or cut it
   

   Fix the outline from the report, never from memory. A figure like slide 4’s leaves the deck or gets worked out by you in a spreadsheet, where you can see the formula (Let the spreadsheet do the math shows that split). If the assistant corrects a number, check the correction too.

5. Build the slides. In PowerPoint on a computer (paths checked in October 2026):

   • Copy your corrected slides into a new Word document. Choose View > Outline and set each title to Level 1 and each point to Level 2 in the Outline Level box (on Windows, Ctrl+Alt+1 and Ctrl+Alt+2 apply Heading 1 and Heading 2, which works too). Leave the notes as body text: PowerPoint skips text in the Normal style.
   • Save and close the document. On a Mac, save it in Rich Text Format, the only Word format PowerPoint for Mac imports.
   • In PowerPoint for Windows, choose Home > New Slide > Slides from Outline and insert the file. On a Mac, click the arrow next to New Slide and choose Outline. PowerPoint for the web can’t do this.
   • Click through the slides once and fix anything that came through oddly, such as a doubled bullet. Pick a design, then paste each slide’s notes into the notes pane under it (if it’s hidden, click Notes at the bottom of the window).

   In Google Slides, add a slide per title and paste in the title, points and speaker notes; for eight slides that’s a few minutes of copying. Either way, when you’re tempted to paste a paragraph from the report onto a slide, put it in the notes.

6. Add charts from the real data. Where a point is a trend or a comparison, a chart beats bullets. Copy the figures from the report’s own table into a spreadsheet, check them against the page and make the chart there. In the desktop apps, paste an Excel chart into PowerPoint with the paste option Use Destination Theme & Link Data to keep it linked to the workbook. In Google Slides, choose Insert > Chart > From Sheets with Link to spreadsheet ticked, and click Update on the chart when the sheet changes. Typing the figures yourself is usually quicker than checking a chart an assistant drew.

7. Rehearse once with a timer and cut. Stand up, start the timer and present to an empty room from your notes. Note the time at each slide change; in PowerPoint for Windows, Slide Show > Rehearse Timings does it for you (if you keep the timings, set Advance slides to Manually under Set Up Slide Show before the meeting). If you run over, cut a slide rather than talk faster, starting with the one your three sentences can do without, and keep it after the closing slide for questions. Rewrite any sentence in the notes you stumbled over.

   If you present in English and PowerPoint is set to English, a second run with Slide Show > Rehearse with Coach reports your pace, your filler words and whether you’re reading the slides aloud (a free preview, English only, when checked in October 2026). Either way, write down how long the whole job took, so the next report has a number to beat.

You’re done when the deck runs inside ten minutes, every figure on it is either Confirmed or worked out in your own spreadsheet, and the last slide states what you’re asking for.

Three prompts and a test to copy

Prompt 1, the argument:

The attached report is the source for a presentation. Read all of it before answering.

Audience: [who will be there and what they already know]
Time: [minutes]
What I want them to decide or do: [one sentence]

Write the argument in three sentences:
1. The finding that matters most to this audience.
2. Why it matters to them now.
3. What I'm asking them to decide or do.

After each sentence, give the report pages it rests on, counting the first page of the file as page 1. If the report doesn't support my request, say so instead of filling the gap.

Prompt 2, the outline:

This is my argument, edited by me:
[paste your three sentences]

From the same report, write an outline of [6 to 10] slides that makes this argument in [minutes] minutes.
- Title: one full sentence of 15 words or fewer stating the slide's message. No topic labels such as "Background" or "Results".
- Up to three points per slide, 12 words or fewer each, with the report page.
- Notes: three or four sentences I could say aloud, then the pages they draw on.
- Copy every number exactly as the report states it. Do not round, convert, add up or calculate. If a point needs a figure the report doesn't state, write "needs data".
- The first slide states the main finding, the last one my request.

Lay out each slide like this, with no other labels:
The slide's title as one full sentence
- A point (p. 12)
- Another point (p. 9)
Notes: what I'll say. Pages: 9, 12

Then list what you left out of the report.

Prompt 3, the numbers:

List every number in the outline (amounts, percentages, counts, dates), one per line:
Slide | Number as written | Report page | Exact sentence from the report that states it
If a number doesn't appear in the report as written, write "calculated" or "not found" instead of the sentence.

The title test:

For each slide title:
- Is it a full sentence with a verb?
- Could someone who reads only this title act on it, or disagree with it?
- Does it say something only this report could say?
If any answer is no, rewrite the title.

What can go wrong and how to check

Too many slides, too much on each

Left alone, an assistant covers the whole report. Set the number of slides yourself, cut what the argument doesn’t need, and say on the last slide where to find the full report.

Labels instead of messages

Titles drift back to labels once a design template offers a neat title box. After the build, read only the titles in order. If they don’t tell the story without you, run the title test again.

Numbers that change on the way

A figure gets rounded, a percentage becomes “one in five”, last year’s number stands in for this year’s. Prompt 3 and step 4 catch these. If the report is a scanned PDF, compare every figure with the page by eye: the assistant reports a misread digit as confidently as a correct one.

Speaker notes that sound stiff aloud

Notes drafted by an assistant read like a report. Trim them to the words you need to glance at.

Built-in slide generators

Copilot in PowerPoint and Gemini in Google Slides can draft a whole deck from a document, depending on your plan; in October 2026, Gemini’s version worked only in English. Give them the checked outline from step 5 rather than the raw report, and run step 4 on whatever comes out.

Where to go next

Save the three prompts and the title test somewhere you’ll find them (Keep your best prompts in one place suggests how), and the next report that lands on your desk starts at step 2. If you present the same figures every month, A monthly summary you build once and refresh each month sets up a pivot table with charts that update when new data arrives; link them into your slides as in step 6, and next month you only rewrite the words around them. And the report you just took apart can reach more people than one meeting: A month of posts from one piece you’ve already written turns it into eight short posts, checked against the source the same way you checked your slides.