Prompt for Compelling Slides

A strong prompt has four layers:

1. Context & audience — Tell the model who's watching and what decision they need to make. Slides for a CFO differ wildly from slides for a sales team. Example: "Audience is the leadership team deciding whether to expand into the Inner West market. They're time-poor and want the bottom line."

2. The narrative arc — This is what most people skip. Specify the story shape, not just the content. The most reliable structure is Situation → Complication → Resolution:

• Slide 1: where things stand (the setup)

• Slide 2: the tension / what's broken or at risk (the "so what")

• Slide 3: the insight or recommendation (the payoff)

• Slide 4 (optional): the action / next step

3. The "one message per slide" rule — Tell it each slide needs a single takeaway as the title (an assertion, not a label). "Revenue grew 12%" beats "Revenue Overview." This is the core of Knaflic-style data storytelling.

4. Chart + design specs — Specify chart type per point, what to highlight, and what to strip away.

Here's a template you could reuse:

You're a data storytelling expert. I'm attaching a dataset of [DESCRIBE THE DATA]. Create a 4-slide deck for [AUDIENCE] who need to [DECISION THEY MUST MAKE].

Structure:
- Slide 1 — TITLE: Open with the core decision phrased as a QUESTION as the headline (e.g. "Where should we open our next branch?"), not a generic label. Include: organisation name, a one-line subtitle, and a "prepared by / prepared for / date" block.
- Slide 2 — SITUATION: where things stand today (the setup)
- Slide 3 — COMPLICATION: what's broken, at risk, or surprising (the tension)
- Slide 4 — ACTION and ESOLUTION: the insight and recommendation (the payoff) — make this the hero slide, the concrete next step, ownership, and review point

Rules:
- Each content-slide title must be a full-sentence INSIGHT, not a category label (e.g. "78% of revenue comes from two stalled suburbs" — not "Revenue Overview"). The titles alone should tell the whole story if you covered the charts.
- One key message per slide; supporting data sits underneath.
- Lead with the conclusion first (BLUF), then the evidence.
- For each slide, recommend the best chart type AND tell me exactly which single data point to highlight — colour that one point, grey out the rest. Let colour do the pointing so no callout clutter is needed.
- Make the recommendation slide's chart show two variables at once (e.g. a scatter) so the winning option sits visually alone in the sweet spot and the recommendation looks self-evident.
- Flag the single most important number on each slide.
- Keep it clean: strip chart junk, no decorative clutter, sentence case throughout.

FIRST: before building anything, analyse the data and propose the 4 slide takeaways as a one-line outline. Wait for my approval before expanding into the full deck.