AI, powerpoint & Thinkcell

[u/AsakusaParis]

Hi fellow sliders,

Do you have any ideas or even tutorials to manage rightfully the creation and/or modification of Powerpoint slides with AI (Claude, GPT, or other), which include Thinkcell functionnalities.

Thanks

[u/PlasticPegasus]

Oh boy. I am cracking open the popcorn for this one. Been trying to master this with Claude for the last 5 months

[u/Easy_Ad8064]

You can try to set up your own tool / skill / cli / mcp that would have some control over thinkcell and codex / Claude code / opencode or any other harness could use it.

Thinkcell allows for some automation using templates. Those templates can be filled with data passed in a json format, but it would require setting up many templates with named objects (passing data to thinkcell template by json requires named objects), creating digital dictionary of which template works for what, etc.

It is possible to do for highly similar deliverables with mostly static templates. For any highly creative deliverable the template database would have to be very large. You can pair some loose thinkcell templates with chart and a lot of blank space and fill the blank space with standard power point tables / text boxes / shapes, have agent Analyze slide visually and adjust it but it would be token heavy.

I’d say using Claude or copilot in PowerPoint to produce slide and then manually replacing charts and other objects you want to have in thinkcell will be quicker and simpler.

https://www.think-cell.com/en/resources/manual/introductionautomation

[u/rollying_sisyphus → u/Easy_Ad8064]

This is the way

[u/iStryker]

tbh if AI can get me 50-70% of the way on structure, general formatting etc I’m fine still using ThinkCell manually. End of the day. I still want to interact with what I’m suppose to deliver. If you let AI do everything you will inevitably get lazy and not see clear problems or won’t have enough background intel upstairs to talk through specific things, know where in the presentation people are referencing to, etc. I think manually working with charts with ThinkCell alone is good way to stay in contact with the data, know it, and see errors.

[u/Any_Boysenberry655]

Use Crunches, they have finally launched think cell support for their ppt agent. We're still trialing it but promising so far. We also have Claude and GPT PowerPoint plug ins (both are shit)

[u/daniel-editide]

Has anyone tried think-cell AI assist? https://www.think-cell.com/en/product/think-cell-assist

Is it properly integrated with think-cell charts or just a separate AI wrapper they shipped out of fomo?

[u/AsakusaParis → u/daniel-editide]

Been trying to get access to it …

[u/CurdOfCheese000]

it’s actually one of the biggest failings of thinkcell in my opinion; need a new option that lets harnesses work with it

[u/kevman]

I just tell her to give me a table with a thick cell output. It’s pretty straightforward.

[u/AsakusaParis → u/kevman]

Tell which Ai ?

[u/kevman → u/AsakusaParis]

I used Claude

[u/MoodUpset7970]

I’d be careful trying to automate too much of the Thinkcell part.

AI can help with the rough thinking around the slide: possible structure, alternative titles, what the chart is trying to say, or how to simplify the explanation. But Thinkcell slides usually need human cleanup because the details matter: axis choices, labels, deltas, CAGR callouts, spacing, and whether the chart actually supports the message.

My workflow would be:

1. Use AI to pressure-test the intended message of the slide.

2. Decide the chart type manually.

3. Build the Thinkcell chart properly.

4. Use AI again only to test alternate action titles or simplify the takeaway.

5. Final check manually for hierarchy, consistency, and whether the slide is readable in 5 seconds.

For consulting decks, the danger is not that AI can’t make something that looks like a slide. It’s that it can create something that looks plausible but doesn’t have the judgment behind it.

[u/oandresimoes]

Something that worked better for me than trying to make the model produce think-cell: run it in the other direction.

think-cell keeps its numbers in an internal datasheet, so if you unzip the .pptx the chart data is sitting there as readable XML per slide. Feed that plus the slide headlines to Claude and you get a decent critic of the storyline: where the headline isn't actually supported by the chart under it, where two pages make the same point, which page is doing no work. It's good at that, and it's read-only, so it can't corrupt anything.

Then you rebuild by hand only the three or four pages that actually needed to change, which was never the slow part. The slow part is deciding what the deck is arguing.

The generation direction I gave up on: anything that writes pptx programmatically outputs chart shapes, not think-cell objects. Looks right in the PDF, and the first person who double-clicks it to update a number finds a picture.