Turn a whiteboard into a PowerPoint deck

You brainstormed properly. Then someone asked for the deck by Friday, and now you are copying your own thinking into slides one box at a time.

Why the deck is always the painful part

The thinking is already finished. The board has the argument, the evidence and the running order. What remains is transcription, and transcription is where a good afternoon goes to die.

The usual workaround is a screenshot of the whole board pasted onto one slide. It is unreadable at the back of a room, and it hides the structure you worked hardest on.

Framing solves this because a frame is a deliberate act. You are telling the tool where one idea stops and the next begins, which is exactly the information a slide deck needs.

How to do it

1. Arrange the board the way you want the deck to read

   Left to right, top to bottom. The export follows the same reading order, so the arrangement is the running order.

2. Select the first section and press Cmd G

   That draws a frame around the selection. Do the same for each section. One frame becomes one slide.

3. Name each frame

   The frame name becomes the slide title, so a frame called Q3 risks arrives as a slide titled Q3 risks.

4. Open Export and choose PowerPoint

   The file downloads straight to your machine. Nothing is uploaded to a server to make it.

Worth knowing before you start

Each slide carries your frame as a high resolution image, not as separate editable shapes. That keeps the layout looking exactly like your board, but it means you cannot drag an individual sticky note around once you are in PowerPoint. If you need every element editable downstream, export to Word instead and rebuild the visuals there, or keep presenting from the board itself.

Common questions