Turn an ugly Excel into 15 slides with Gamma

I’ve got a folder full of spreadsheets I keep meaning to “make presentable” and never do. You know the ones. Twelve tabs, mystery columns, colors that mean something only to past-you. Then your boss opens it, squints, and pretends to read it. So when I saw this workflow from a LinkedIn creator, I actually stopped scrolling.

The person who posted it shared a dead-simple trick: feed your messy Excel into Gamma and let it spit out a clean 15-slide deck that explains your numbers instead of just dumping them. What blew me away is the honesty in the post. This professional said their spreadsheet was “the worst Excel I’ve ever seen” and they changed nothing before importing it. No cleanup. No prep. That’s the part I want you to hear.

Let me walk you through the exact steps the author laid out, with a quick note on why each one matters.

The step-by-step workflow

1. Save your Excel as a PDF. Gamma reads PDFs far more reliably than raw spreadsheet files, so this is your on-ramp. Go to your spreadsheet, hit File then Download then PDF.
2. Open gamma.app and click “Create with AI.” This is the mode that builds a full deck from a source document instead of a blank canvas.
3. Click “Import files” and drag your PDF in. That’s the whole handoff. No formatting, no rewriting your columns.
4. Skip the cleanup. The original poster stressed this hard: don’t fix your spreadsheet first. Messy input still works, which is the entire point of the shortcut.
5. Wait under a minute, then pick a theme. Start with one of Gamma’s built-in themes. The creator mentioned building a custom theme once, so every future deck exports in your own look without touching a single color again.
6. Choose your AI image model. The author set it to “ChatGPT 2” for the visuals.
7. Set it to 15 slides, then hit Generate. This gives the AI enough room to move from raw data into real explanation.
8. Read the first slide. It’ll be your raw numbers dressed up in nice fonts. Pretty, but still just data.

The clever part: find the slide that “gets it”

Here’s the insight that makes this whole thing sing. As you scroll down the generated deck, the AI stops copying your numbers and starts explaining them. Actual analysis. For this LinkedIn user, that shift happened around slide 13.

That analysis slide is the target. It’s what you want every other slide to look like. Instead of accepting a deck that’s half data-dump and half insight, you tell Gamma to level the whole thing up to match its own best work.

9. Open Gamma’s “Agent mode” and paste this exact prompt:

“Remake slides 3 to 13. I don’t want the raw information from my Excel file. Delete the old ones and replace them with data analysis, like you’ve done from slide 13 on.”

10. Hit enter and let it rebuild. Gamma reworks every one of those slides into the analysis style.
11. Notice the difference. The creator summed it up perfectly: it’s the gap between an ugly Excel and a real presentation.
12. Share it as a link, not a file. This is a small move with a big payoff.
13. Set it to “anyone with the link can view” and send that link.

Why the “link, not a file” step matters

I think this is the most underrated tip in the whole post. When you send a link instead of an attachment, your boss never opens an overwhelming spreadsheet, never asks which tab to look at, and never downloads anything. As the original poster put it, he just clicks and reads a deck that explains itself.

That’s a psychology win as much as a formatting one. A raw Excel makes the reader do the work of interpreting your numbers. A clean, analysis-first deck does that work for them. Same data, completely different experience on the other end.

Where this fits the bigger picture

This lands right in the middle of a trend I keep seeing: AI tools that skip the tedious middle step. You used to need hours in a slide editor to turn a data table into something a busy person would actually read. Now the messy file goes in one side and a polished, explained presentation comes out the other. The savvy professional behind this framed it as “PDF in, presentation out in just 2 minutes,” and honestly that’s not an exaggeration for the workflow they showed.

A couple of practical use cases where I’d reach for this:

• Weekly reports your manager “reads” but never really does.
• Client updates where the raw numbers feel intimidating.
• Team recaps where you want the takeaway front and center, not buried in row 400.

The genius move is the agent-mode prompt. Letting the AI generate first, then telling it to copy its own best slide, is a repeatable pattern you can steal for all kinds of AI output, not just decks.

Go check the full LinkedIn post for the creator’s exact settings and screenshots. Then try it on that one file you’ve been dreading all week. Drop it in, prompt it, and send a link instead of a spreadsheet.