Give AI the whole deck update.

Hand over the whole update.

The useful request is bigger than “change the sales total on slide two.” Give the agent the presentation, the source material, the change notes, and the decision the audience needs to make. Then make it responsible for carrying the changes through.

That is the approach in Matt’s guide to prompting agents: supply the outcome and the context, and make the standard for done concrete. Let the agent choose the route.

For a deck, the standard includes the facts and the saved presentation. A correct calculation does not establish that the chart was updated. A file that opens does not establish that its labels are readable.

“Finished” means the story, the numbers, and the file agree.

The chart has its own copy of the data.

The most useful finding in the file audit is easy to miss when looking at a slide: this PowerPoint contains an embedded workbook for its chart, plus stored chart values. Those are separate from the source workbook supplied alongside the deck.

In this particular file, the chart relationship points inside the PowerPoint package. The audit found no external file relationships, and its chart settings do not request an automatic update. Changing the separate sales workbook alone would not refresh these stored values.

That means “I updated the spreadsheet” is not enough evidence for “I updated the presentation.” The deck assignment needs to cover the chart’s data, the visible labels, and the written interpretation.

This is a finding about the supplied file, not a claim that every PowerPoint behaves the same way. Linked charts and different authoring tools need their own inspection.

Follow one changed number all the way through.

The practice case is Northstar, a fictional studio reviewing its June 2026 client portfolio. The starting export has 20 rows, including one duplicate, a refund, a cancelled transaction, a pending transaction, and a completed sale with no owner assigned.

The correction is deliberately small. A $3,500 pending transaction becomes paid. Separately, a $1,500 completed sale is assigned to Maya. The second correction changes the owner breakdown, but it does not add another $1,500 to the business total.

Willow’s own sales have not changed. Its share falls because the denominator changes. A slide can therefore keep the correct client total and still show the wrong percentage.

The action list also needs attention. “Assign the $1,500 sale” is now obsolete. So is a request to resolve the original $10,500 of pending and cancelled transactions as though neither source record had changed.

The assignment to adapt.

Replace the bracketed details with your actual audience and decision. Attach an approved deck, the current source data, and a short explanation of what changed. If the agent cannot access those files, resolve that before trusting an update.

Update the attached presentation so it is ready for [audience] to use for [decision]. The existing deck is the reference for the style and level of detail. The source files and change notes contain the facts. Own the whole update, including the parts that stop being true when a number changes.

Choose the best way to do the work. Keep what already works. Improve the story where the new information calls for it. I want a finished presentation, not a list of suggested edits.

The bar for done: every number agrees with the source, every conclusion still follows from the evidence, and the deck is readable and editable where your tools support it. Check chart data, labels, percentages, notes, and follow-up actions as well as the obvious headline. Don't invent a comparison, explanation, owner, deadline, or recommendation the evidence cannot support.

Work on a copy. Make routine decisions yourself. If something important is genuinely ambiguous, inspect the supplied materials first and ask only if the answer would change the result.

Inspect the saved presentation with the tools you have. Open it and check every slide if you can. Fix the biggest remaining problems and recheck what changed. If a fresh reviewer is available, have it challenge the actual file against the source without your explanation of why it should pass. Identify whether that review was by another agent or a person.

Deliver the updated deck and a short handoff: what changed, the consequential judgment calls, and exactly what you checked. If you cannot edit, render, or check something here, say so and finish the useful work you can. An unavailable check is not a passed check.

Example brief adapted from Matt’s published approach. The pack also contains the exact, narrower assignment used for the read-only audit.

Make the review earn the word “done.”

Give the reviewer the actual output, the sources, and the assignment. Let it find the biggest consequential problem. If it only reads the creator’s explanation, it can agree with a mistake without ever seeing the file.

There are different checks here, and they answer different questions:

• Source check: do the totals, exclusions, and percentages follow from the data?
• File check: did the updated values reach the text, chart, and notes in the saved deck?
• Visual check: do the rendered slides remain readable, with sensible scales and no clipped content?
• Handoff check: can another person make a normal edit without breaking the presentation?

For this article, we performed the source calculation and inspected the original file’s stored structure. The revised native file, visual review, and colleague handoff remain unperformed. They are requirements in the assignment, not results we are claiming.

If your agent cannot operate PowerPoint, it can still audit the data and produce a revision plan. Keep the missing checks visible so a useful partial result does not become a false sign-off.

Try it with a deck you can safely change.

The pack contains the original six-slide PowerPoint, the original workbook, the raw export, and an explicit corrected snapshot. The Office files are unchanged starter files. The audit and revision plan tell you what to look for after asking your own agent to do the update.

Start with the fictional case. For a work presentation, use copies and approved data, name the decision and audience, and include the previous version you consider good. Keep the business definitions with the files.

The valuable skill is learning to assign and judge the complete job. Once the agent understands the outcome, the sources, and the standard, you can spend less of the conversation directing small operations.

What we did, and what we didn’t.

This exercise was prepared with coding agents on September 2, 2026. It is teaching material, not a product benchmark or a report about Matt’s business.

• InputsThe original Northstar PowerPoint and sales export, with two explicitly authored corrections to the same June 2026 period. All business data is fictional.
• Actual workA coding agent inspected the PowerPoint ZIP/XML package, all six slide texts and notes, chart caches, embedded workbook values, and file relationships. It calculated the implications of both corrections.
• ReviewThe coordinating coding agent separately checked the source arithmetic and preserved the starter-file hashes. The deck’s historical references to a separate checked workbook were not verified. Agent review is not human approval.
• Not performedNo native PowerPoint editing, slide rendering, live chart refresh, product comparison, human handoff, or time-savings measurement.

The download includes the exact exercise assignment, preserved outputs, source hashes, and verification notes. The prompt in this article is the broader assignment to adapt to your own environment.