Make Basic Academic Slides

Make Basic Academic Slides

Create restrained academic presentations that look like slides prepared directly by a researcher: clear title, concise scientific points, and no decorative presentation framework.

Core style

• Use a 16:9 white slide with black text.
• Use Arial or another standard sans-serif font throughout.
• Use one left-aligned title and one single-column bullet list on each content slide.
• Use 3–5 bullets per slide. Keep each bullet to one sentence whenever possible.
• Use direct, factual wording. Remove filler, slogans, rhetorical framing, and repeated conclusions.
• Keep the title slide equally plain: paper title plus one short subtitle only.
• Add a small page number at the bottom right when useful.
• Keep all text editable and native to PowerPoint.

Do not use cards, boxes, colored panels, columns, quadrants, timelines, process arrows, icons, badges, decorative lines, gradients, illustrations, or stock imagery unless the user explicitly requests them. Do not automatically turn lists into diagrams.

Recommended geometry

For a 1280 × 720 slide:

• Title: left 72 px, top 52 px, width about 1120 px, height 100 px; 44–48 px font.
• Bullet list: left 92 px, top 180 px, width about 1080 px, height 455 px; 27–30 px font.
• Page number: bottom-right; 14 px font.
• Title slide title: left 72 px, vertically centered around 180–400 px; 64–72 px font.

Adjust sizes manually for fit. Do not use shrink-to-fit as a substitute for editing the content.

Content workflow

1. Read the full source material needed for the presentation. Do not rely only on the abstract when the complete paper is available.
2. Identify the presentation purpose and audience from the user request. Preserve the user's requested scope; do not add reviewer comments or criticism unless requested.
3. Build a short narrative outline before creating slides. Use one scientific idea per slide.
4. Write concise slide titles that state the topic directly. Avoid titles written as marketing claims.
5. Select only the key evidence, methods, trade-offs, applications, and takeaways needed for that idea.
6. Remove redundant detail until each slide can be understood quickly during an oral presentation.

For review-paper presentations, a useful default sequence is:

1. Paper title
2. Motivation or problem
3. Existing foundation or background
4. Main conceptual categories
5. Major experimental methods
6. Representative computational methods
7. Applications
8. Limitations or trade-offs, if part of the paper
9. Key takeaways

Adapt the sequence to the paper rather than forcing every category into every deck.

Build and verify

1. Use the Presentations skill and its required PowerPoint creation workflow.
2. Use assets/basic-academic-reference.pptx only as a visual reference when helpful. Do not copy its scientific content into an unrelated presentation.
3. Preserve the original source file when revising an existing deck. Export the simplified deck as a separate copy unless the user asks to overwrite it.
4. Add source notes to each slide when factual content comes from papers or external sources. Use the presentation workflow's [Sources] note block.
5. Render every slide after export.
6. Inspect the montage and every slide at full size for clipping, excessive wrapping, inconsistent margins, and accidental decorative elements.
7. Run the presentation overflow test and fix all reported issues before delivery.

Quality bar

The finished deck should feel plain, readable, and researcher-made. A slide succeeds when the audience can understand its main point within a few seconds and nothing on the slide competes with the scientific content.