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How to fill a PowerPoint template with AI

Short answer: Add {{name}} placeholders to your branded .pptx and drop it in the workspace’s templates folder. Then ask the AI to fill it: it reads the placeholders, asks for anything it’s missing, and writes a new deck with your theme, fonts, and layout untouched.

Steps

  1. Open your branded PowerPoint file and mark where content should go with mustache-style placeholders ({{client_name}}, {{deal_size:number}}, {{close_date:date}}) typed directly into the slide text. Leave the type off for plain text ({{client_name}}), or add :number / :date for values Excel-style formatting should apply to.
  2. In the workspace’s Files panel, create a BuildPerch/templates folder at the workspace root (use the panel’s new-folder button) if it doesn’t exist, then drag the .pptx into it.
  3. In chat, ask the AI to fill it (e.g. “fill the client-deck template for Acme, deal size $42,000, closing June 30”), or point it at a spreadsheet of rows to fill one slide per client. The AI checks the template’s exact placeholder names and types first, then fills it.
  4. Approve the write when the banner appears (skip this if the chat’s auto-approve tier is set to All tools). The finished deck saves to BuildPerch/documents/.
  5. To swap a picture (a logo, a product photo), tell the AI which image to use; it replaces the slide’s picture frame directly rather than through a text placeholder, so the template’s theme and layout stay intact.
  6. For a multi-row deck (one output slide per client, per product, per row), ask for that explicitly: the AI repeats the same template slide with different fills, in the order you want.

Notes & gotchas

  • Image placeholders only work in .pptx templates, and only through the picture-frame swap above: a literal {{logo:image}} text placeholder is rejected.
  • If you don’t name the output file, it’s named from the first slide’s title fill (or the template’s own name); a name collision gets a (2) suffix automatically.
  • If a placeholder needs information you haven’t given it, the AI asks rather than inventing values.
  • Word and Excel templates use the exact same {{name}} syntax and the same BuildPerch/templates folder; see how to create a Word/Excel/PowerPoint from data for the template-free version of this workflow.