Every consultant has a slide deck problem.
You spend 40 minutes wrestling with PowerPoint's layout engine. You nudge a text box two pixels left. You copy-paste your brand colours into a colour picker for the ninth time this month. You email someone a .pptx file and they open it on a different machine and everything shifts.
The slides aren't the work. The slides are packaging for the work. But packaging absorbs time like nothing else.
I did what any reasonable person would do. I built a single HTML template that generates presentations from a content brief, in 90 seconds.
How it works
The system is a skill inside Claude Code — Anthropic's CLI tool that I use as a working environment. When I type /presentation followed by a topic, audience, and rough structure, it does five things:
Parses the brief — topic, audience, slide count, key points
Asks me to pick a colour palette (five presets or custom hex codes)
Recommends slide types based on the content
Assembles a self-contained HTML file
Saves it and tells me to open it in a browser
The output is a single .html file. No PowerPoint. No Google Slides. No Keynote. One file, zero external dependencies beyond a Google Fonts import. Open it in Chrome, press F11, and you're presenting.
Arrow keys navigate. Clicking advances. Fixed navigation dots sit on the right edge. Ctrl+P prints it to a landscape PDF with one slide per page, colours preserved.
The component library underneath
The leverage is in the template. It contains twelve slide types, each defined as a reusable HTML pattern:
Title slides with headline, subtitle, and tag pills
Card grids (2, 3, or 4 columns) for metrics or feature highlights
Two-column splits for side-by-side comparison
Comparison tables with before/after and rationale columns
Outcome lists with numbered items
Flow diagrams (3, 4, or 5 steps) for processes
Loop diagrams for cyclical processes
Stat rows for big numbers
Issue lists for risks and blockers
Gap badges for KPI-style metrics
Big question slides for provocative reframing
Closing slides for summary statements
Every component is styled, responsive, and print-ready. The skill picks which ones to use based on the content, populates them with language from the brief, and alternates dark and light backgrounds for visual rhythm.
Why HTML instead of PowerPoint
Three reasons.
Consistency. CSS custom properties mean every colour, font weight, spacing value, and border radius is defined once. Change the palette and the entire deck updates. No hunting through 47 slides to fix a rogue orange.
Portability. The file opens on any machine with a browser. No version conflicts. No missing fonts. No "this was built in Keynote and you're on Windows" conversations. Send someone the HTML file and it looks identical everywhere.
Speed. The bottleneck in consulting presentations isn't design taste — it's the mechanical work of laying out content. A 10-slide deck that takes 45 minutes in PowerPoint takes 90 seconds to generate. The time I get back goes into making the content sharper, not making boxes line up.
What it doesn't do
It doesn't do animations. It doesn't do embedded video. It doesn't do interactive data visualisations. If you need those, use a proper presentation tool.
Most consulting presentations don't need those. They need clear structure, readable type, consistent branding, and content that doesn't get lost in production overhead.
The deeper point
This is a small example of a pattern I keep seeing: the gap between "tool exists" and "tool serves the work" is where most waste lives. PowerPoint is capable software. It's also capable of absorbing time that should go elsewhere.
The right question isn't "what's the best presentation tool?" It's "how much time am I spending on packaging versus thinking?" If the ratio is wrong, the tool is wrong — regardless of how many features it has.
Build the thing that removes the friction. Even if it's unglamorous. Especially if it's unglamorous.
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