I run a 12-seat specialty coffee roastery. Make me a 6-slide deck for two investors: where revenue stands, the wholesale-vs-retail split, our one bottleneck (roasting capacity), what the next round gets spent on, and the ask. Use clearly-bracketed placeholder numbers so I can drop mine in. Deliver the .pptx file.
About forty seconds in, a line surfaced under the progress bar: *Hex colors need a different format — retrying.* Nothing stopped. It corrected the format and carried on, and I was never asked to weigh in. The finished file gives no hint that it happened, which is exactly why it's worth writing down.
What landed is a real PowerPoint file, six slides, in the order the request listed them. Placeholders are bracketed the whole way through, so searching for an opening square bracket finds every blank at once: `[ROASTERY NAME]`, `[CITY]`, `[MONTH / YEAR]` on the title slide, and the revenue figures further in.
I said nothing about where the roastery is. The wrap-up note said: *I used S$ throughout given you're in Singapore.* It read that off the account. When the guess is right you save a pass through the file; when it's wrong you're doing find-and-replace. Either way I'd rather it tell me it guessed than quietly pick one.
The charts are the part I expected to be oversold, and weren't. The bars and pie wedges are drawn shapes, not real data behind a chart object, so it titled them `PLACEHOLDER SHAPE, NOT ACTUALS` right on the slide and explained that you right-click, choose Edit Data, put your own numbers in, then delete that title line once they're real.
Nobody made it admit that. It could have handed over six slides that looked finished and let me discover it in front of two investors instead.
The run cost $0.203537 on Smart, start to finish in about a minute. Replay it here: https://elsedoes.com/share/2e319816acf640c5bdf87fa8bc779f0e
specialty_coffee_roastery_investor_deck.pptx 44 KB
By Heei