How to ask AI questions about a presentation

A 70-slide quarterly review lands in your inbox the night before the meeting. A vendor sends a pitch deck with pricing somewhere in the appendix. A conference talk you missed is shared afterwards as a PowerPoint file. In each case there’s a specific thing you want to know, and the deck runs in the order it will be presented, which makes a single figure slow to track down.

This guide covers how people usually get answers out of slide decks, and how to add a presentation to Fabric and ask its AI assistant direct questions about it, including questions that span several decks.

How people usually get answers from a deck

Clicking through in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides is the default. Slide sorter view helps you spot the section you want, and Find works for exact words. Both depend on remembering what the slide was called, and decks often put the real detail in charts, footnotes and appendix slides with headings like “Additional detail”.

Another common route is exporting the deck to PDF and uploading it to a chatbot. That gets you answers quickly for one file. When the deck is revised, the export has to be done again, and questions that need last quarter’s version or the notes from the meeting where it was presented require uploading those too.

Asking the person who built the deck is often the fastest of all. It also depends on their availability, and the answer lives in a chat message that’s hard to find a month later.

Step 1: Add the presentation to Fabric

Fabric reads PPT and PPTX files. Drag the deck into the web or desktop app, or click Upload a file. On a phone, open the file in any app, tap Share and choose Fabric.

Decks that arrive by email can be forwarded straight to your Fabric email address, which saves the attachment without downloading it first. It accepts mail from your verified account address. For decks that live in Google Slides, connect Google Drive through the Fabric marketplace: click Install, sign in and grant permissions. Connections need a paid plan.

Step 2: Put the deck with what surrounds it

A presentation rarely tells the whole story by itself. Create a folder for it and add the material that explains it: the previous version, the spreadsheet the charts were built from, the brief it responds to, and any notes you took while it was presented.

If the deck was presented on a call, the Fabric desktop app can transcribe the meeting in Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet without a bot joining. Put that transcript in the same folder, and the assistant can answer from what was said as well as what was shown. Transcription needs a paid plan. How to combine your meeting notes with the transcript explains the meeting side of this.

Step 3: Ask the assistant about the slides

Open the folder and open the AI assistant. It’s automatically limited to that folder, so its answers come from the deck and the files beside it. You can also right-click the folder and add it to the assistant’s context without opening it.

Ask the questions you’d ask the presenter. “What is the proposed price for the enterprise tier?” “What growth rate does the forecast assume?” “Which slides talk about hiring, and what do they say?” “Summarize the three main recommendations in a paragraph each.” Answers cite their sources with clickable references, so you can open the deck and confirm the figure in context.

Follow-up questions are where this saves the most time. If the answer mentions a risk, ask what mitigation the deck proposes. If a number looks high, ask where else in the folder it appears.

Step 4: Compare one deck with another

With two versions in the same folder, ask the assistant what changed. “How does the Q3 roadmap differ from the Q2 roadmap?” “Which targets moved between the January and April decks?” This also works across decks from different sources, such as three vendor pitches for the same project, where the question is which one offers the best support terms.

For a specific phrase, search is quicker than a question. Click Search or press Cmd+F (Mac) / Ctrl+F (Windows), and put words in quotes for an exact match. Filters narrow results to a folder or kind of item.

Step 5: Turn the answers into prep you can share

Save a useful answer as a note and it becomes part of your prep: a summary of the deck, a list of questions to raise, a comparison of the options. Notes in Fabric can be edited, and you can ask the assistant to refine one, accepting or rejecting each change it makes.

If colleagues need the same context, share the folder with them. With shared folders you set each person’s permission as viewer, commenter or editor, and people outside your workspace can use the shared link without signing up.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI read a PowerPoint file?

Yes. Fabric reads PPT and PPTX files, and the AI assistant can answer questions about a deck once it’s in Fabric.

Can I ask questions about a Google Slides presentation?

Yes, through the Google Drive connection, which needs a paid plan. Once connected, your Google Slides decks are available to search and the assistant.

How do I get a summary of a long slide deck?

Open the folder that contains the deck, open the AI assistant and ask for a summary. You can ask for a specific shape, such as one paragraph per section or a list of decisions.

Can AI compare two versions of a presentation?

Put both versions in the same folder and ask the assistant what changed between them. It analyzes everything in the folder and cites the files it drew on.

Will the AI tell me which slide an answer came from?

Answers include clickable source references, so you can open the cited file and check the passage the answer relied on.

Can I ask about what the presenter said, as well as the slides?

Yes, if you transcribed the meeting. Put the transcript in the same folder as the deck, and answers can cite timestamps in the recording. Transcription needs a paid plan.

How do I find a specific slide without asking AI?

Use search. Put the words in quotes for an exact match, and filter by folder or kind of item to narrow the results.

Can I ask AI about a presentation on the free plan?

Yes. Uploading a PowerPoint file and asking the assistant about it works on the free plan, which includes limited AI use. The Google Drive connection and meeting transcription need a paid plan, as shown on the individual pricing page.

Can my team ask questions about the same deck?

Yes. Share the folder with them and each person can use the assistant on it. Team plans are listed on the team pricing page.