Claude makes slides now. Here's what they cost your usage limit.

Published 13 days ago • 2 min read

Hi Reader,

Claude makes slide decks now. Every one counts against your usage limit.

On September 16, Anthropic folded Cowork into regular Claude and switched on two new things: Claude Slides and Claude Docs. Ask for a presentation and Claude drafts it right in the conversation. You edit the slides there, present straight from Claude, or download a PowerPoint or PDF.

It's in beta on paid plans, rolling out to Pro and Max first over the next few weeks. Team and Free "will follow soon." Even two people on the same plan get it on different days.

How to tell if you have it: open Claude. If your message box still shows "Chat" and "Cowork," you don't have it yet. Once your account moves over, there's no switching back.

Here's the part the announcement doesn't lead with. Anthropic's own help page says everything you do in Claude counts toward your plan's usage limits, and longer tasks that create files generally use more. A deck is a file.

So the week everyone tries this, a lot of people will hit their cap on a Tuesday afternoon and not know why. The expensive way to use Slides is asking Claude to rebuild the whole deck four times. The cheap way is doing the thinking in chat and asking for slides once.

This week's AI tip: the one-pass deck (10 minutes)

Paste your raw notes for the week into Claude. Bullets, numbers, whatever you've got. Then send this:

Before you make any slides, turn these notes into a 6-slide outline for my team. One headline per slide that states the point, not the topic. Three bullets max per slide. Pull every number from my notes and don't invent any. Show me the outline only.

Fix the outline in chat. Then send one line: "Now build the slides from this outline." One build instead of four, and the deck says what you meant.

No Slides on your account yet? Run the same prompt anyway. The outline is most of the work, and it pastes into PowerPoint in two minutes.

If you've already hit a cap and want to know when your plan's window resets, I keep every assistant's limits on one page: the AI usage limits cheat sheet. It changes when a vendor moves a number.

Reply with one word: do you have Slides yet? Yes or no. I want to see how fast this rollout actually moves.

And if you'd rather have Claude handle the weekly reporting without you driving every prompt, that's the setup I install for small businesses. Here's how it works.

Talk soon,
Justin

justinmckelvey.com · LinkedIn · X · Blog

Justin McKelvey · Austin, TX

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