PowerPoint vs HTML: I Built the Same Deck with Claude Both Ways

Same company, same slides, same words. On the left a PowerPoint, on the right the same presentation built as a web page. A couple of weeks ago people started posting that Google Slides and PowerPoint are dead. That is a big claim, so I tested it on my own company deck.

I gave Claude one simple prompt and had it build a 10-slide presentation twice: once as a PowerPoint, once as a single HTML file. Then I tested one of the popular GitHub skills for presentations against plain Claude, showed a 40-slide lecture I built this way, and wrote down where HTML still breaks.

What an HTML presentation is

A web page that works like a slide deck. It is one file: you open it in Chrome, press F for full screen and move with the arrow keys. Nothing to install. Because it is a web page, it can do what a website can do: motion, animation, buttons that actually go somewhere, things the audience can click and drag. For years you needed a developer for that. Now AI writes the code.

One prompt, two formats

The prompt was nothing fancy: a professional, clean presentation about my company, my logo and brand colours, 10 slides for a potential cooperation partner, only facts from the website. I sent it in Claude chat with PowerPoint as the format. Then I opened Claude Code and sent the same prompt with one change: a single HTML file that uses what a web page can do and PowerPoint can't, meaning motion, transitions and interactive elements. Two agents built the two decks at the same time.

The PowerPoint

Clean icons, clear bullet points, my portrait and a contact page. I could show it to a partner today. Two things stood out. The slides are static, with no transitions at all. And it used my old logo and colours: no logo file came through with my message, and Claude read "original logo" literally. If you mean the logo you use today, write "my current logo".

The HTML deck

The first try already felt different. Something moves in the background all the time, so a slide never sits still while you talk. Cards light up when you hover over them, slides change with smooth animations, numbers count up and the buttons work. My founder slide even links to one of my videos. The honest catch: it did not fill the screen.

After 20 more minutes

With a more detailed brief and three rounds of feedback, the deck went full screen and got a lot better: a process flow from first call to live system, a before and after slide where you drag the line yourself, and a button that opens my booking page. Side by side, the PowerPoint looks like boring corporate style, and the HTML deck looks like a professional developer built it.

Do you need a skill from GitHub?

Search for HTML presentations and you will find GitHub skills made for exactly this. The most popular one, frontend-slides, has about 32,000 stars. It shows you a few style previews, you pick one and it builds the deck. It can even convert an existing PowerPoint into HTML.

I built the same company deck with it. The text is easier to read thanks to darker colours, but the animations are simpler, and honestly I like the version without the skill more. A skill is a set of instructions. If you like the box it puts you in, great. If you want something creative, it is hard to get out of it.

Anthropic says something similar. Its prompting guide for the newest models says skills written for earlier models are often too prescriptive and can degrade output quality, and suggests removing old instructions to see if the default is better. They did it themselves: this summer they removed more than 80% of Claude Code's system prompt for the new models without losing performance.

My rule: a skill is a template. If you love the template, use it. If you want something that looks like nobody else's, give Claude the goal and get out of the way.

A real 40-slide lecture

Does this survive a real audience? I built my lecture on the AI-native company for the Data and AI course I teach at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga this way: about 40 slides in four acts. The charts are drawn from small dots, and the debate slides let the room vote while I count the hands. Every dot is placed by code, which would be impossible by hand, and all of it came from prompts in a chat. It lives on our website, so anyone with the link can open it, even on a phone: open the lecture.

Where HTML still hurts

• Editing. In PowerPoint you click and type. In HTML you ask the AI or touch the code, which is slower for a quick typo. You can ask Claude to build an edit mode into the deck.
• Sending. Some company email filters block HTML attachments. Send a link, not a file.
• The client wants a PowerPoint. You can export, but complex slides often turn into flat pictures and the motion is gone.
• Offline. If the fonts load from the internet and the Wi-Fi dies, you get default fonts. Test the deck offline before you go on stage.
• Teams. If ten people edit one deck on a company template, PowerPoint still wins.

My rule

If the deck is meant to be presented or sent as a link, like a pitch, a proposal, a keynote or a lecture, I build it in HTML now. If it is a working document other people will edit, it stays in PowerPoint. So PowerPoint is still alive. The static slide, though, is starting to look old.

If you would like your sales decks, reports or proposals built like this, or the process behind them automated, that is what we do at FlowByte. Tell us what you need.

Choosing between AI tools? I compared ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot on 33 features. The decks in the pack are about my own company and use only facts from flowbyte.ai.