Ask for a deck
Ask in plain words: a deck, a pitch, a keynote, “a few slides for Monday” or “a PowerPoint”. Every presentation goes through the agent’s Slides skill, so you don’t need to name it. To call it outright, type$slides with Codex or /slides with Claude Code.
Alpha will:
- Reply with a numbered outline, one line per slide. It asks a question or two first only if your brief leaves the audience, the length or the one takeaway open.
- Pick a palette and at most two typefaces, then write one file, such as
junior-club.deck.html, with the speaker notes inside it. - Check every slide for text that sticks out of the slide, missing images and text too small to read, then render the slides and look at them.
- Open the deck in the slide viewer in your workspace.
Review the slides
Click inside the viewer, then move through the deck with the keys below. On Windows and Linux, use Ctrl where this page shows ⌘.
All shortcuts are listed in Keyboard shortcuts. If the stage reads “No slides found”, the file isn’t laid out as a deck. Ask the agent to fix it, or switch to Source to read it. If the stage reads “The deck didn’t load — its link may have expired.”, press Retry.
Fix a slide by pointing at it
The three tools at the right end of the file header work on the slide on the stage, as they do on the Preview. Esc cancels any of them, and for the paintbrush it also discards the changes you haven’t applied.
Your marks stay on the slide they were drawn on while you move around the deck. Paintbrush changes show on the slide at once but aren’t saved until the agent applies them.
When text runs past a slide’s edge, a warning appears in the bar, such as “slide 4 overflows”. Hover it to see which slides are affected. Click it to jump to the first one. Anything outside the 1280 × 720 box is cut off in the export, so fix it before you download.
Then tell the agent what you want: “Slide 4 overflows. Tighten it so everything fits.”
Present the deck
Press Present or f to show the deck fullscreen, without the bar and the notes. Click or press → to advance. Press Esc or f to leave.Export to PowerPoint or PDF
Open Export and pick a format. The file downloads to your computer, named after the deck, such asjunior-club.pptx. Export is for the session’s owner. A session runs one export or LaTeX build at a time.
If export fails, the message says why. “an export is already running for this session” clears when the first one finishes. “this session’s machine predates deck export — send any message to re-provision it” goes away after your next message.
Why doesn’t the deck show in the Preview?
The Preview frames web apps. A deck served on a port would show there as a file listing or as one long page, with no filmstrip, notes or Export. So the agent doesn’t start a server for a deck. If one is running anyway, the Preview’s port menu lists it as “a deck — open its file instead” and doesn’t frame it. To bring the viewer back to the front, open the file from the file tree, or send:Work with Excalidraw drawings
Ask for a diagram, a flowchart, an architecture sketch or a whiteboard, and the agent draws it as an Excalidraw file. For example: “Draw the Harbor booking app’s architecture as an Excalidraw diagram.” Open the file from the file tree, or click the link to it in the agent’s reply. It opens in the Excalidraw editor itself and takes shape on the canvas as the agent writes it. Drawings you upload open the same way.
To point at particular shapes, select them on the canvas and press Add to prompt, which floats beside the selection. The chip says what each shape is and what it says, and where each arrow starts and ends. There’s no shortcut here, because ⌘ ⇧ L is Excalidraw’s own lock.
Embedded videos and web pages show as their links and are never loaded, and no script in a drawing runs. If the file stops reading as a drawing partway through a write, the bar says “The file no longer reads as a drawing — showing the last one that did” until the next good version. A drawing over 32 MB, usually because of pictures inside it, is too big for the viewer, so download it instead. See Limits.
Read BPMN diagrams
A BPMN file, such as a process from your repository or one you asked the agent for, opens in Diagram view. So does any.xml file that declares the BPMN 2.0 namespace. Source, beside it, shows the XML. The viewer only displays the diagram, so to change the process, ask the agent.
Drag to pan. Zoom with Zoom in and Zoom out, or hold ⌘ and scroll. Fit brings the whole diagram back. Click a task, gateway, event, lane or flow and press Add to prompt or ⌘ ⇧ L. The chip carries the element’s kind and name, its lane and pool, the flows in and out and where they lead, any condition and its documentation. Click the canvas or press Esc to let it go.
The pencil marks up the diagram. Add to chat then sends a picture of the whole diagram with your marks where you drew them. The small icons that mark a task’s type are missing from that picture. A file that isn’t valid BPMN shows “The diagram could not be drawn:” with the reason, and the Source view still shows the file.
People you share the session with can page through a deck, open its notes and present it, but can’t export it. They see drawings in view mode, where Export still works, and diagrams without the picker. None of the pointing tools appear for them, because they have no composer to attach to.
Next steps
Point at and draw on your app
The same pencil, picker and paintbrush, on the running app in the Preview.
Skills that ship with Alpha
What the Slides skill knows, and how to turn it off or call it by name.
File viewers
Open an uploaded .pptx, a PDF or a spreadsheet, and point at what’s inside.
Share a session
Send someone the deck to page through and present, read-only.