Slides asks you a question before you have a single slide, and Docs never does.
Open a Claude Doc and it offers to start typing or to write for you. Open Claude Slides and it says: paste your ideas and turn them into slides. Underneath sits a dropdown reading Choose design system.
Before you have a single slide, Slides wants to know what it should look like. Docs never asks. That difference at second zero tells you what each one is: a doc is text, a deck is a styled object, and the product admits it immediately.
How you get to one
Open Artifacts in the Claude sidebar and pick the Slides tile. Asking for a deck in a conversation works too, and Claude opens one. There is no separate Slides app: it is an artifact type, alongside Docs and Design.
What is on screen
- A design-system picker, before anything exists
- An object toolbar: text box, image, table, shapes. Docs gives document controls instead, like tabs and checklists
- Download, present, a layout toggle and a zoom control along the top right
- An empty deck reading: this deck has no slides yet. Add one, or let Claude add some
Add slide builds it yourself. Describing what you want lets Claude build it. Neither is the intended path over the other, which is unusual and worth knowing before you assume you have to prompt your way through everything.
You know what Slides is
- Know why the first question is about style, not content
- Recognise the object toolbar
- Know you can build by hand or by asking
Next: the design-system trap, and why the picker looks broken.