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Pretty is good at layout and typography. It is not good at guessing what you meant. So spend your words on the content, the source and the constraints, and leave the arrangement to it.

Four habits

“Three columns, 24pt headings, icon on top” is a design brief you now have to maintain. Give Pretty the substance (the three tiers, the numbers, the takeaway) and it will pick a layout that fits your master. Correct the layout afterwards if you disagree; that is one sentence.
A single-slide ask keeps the whole turn about one slide, so Pretty can snapshot it, review it and fix it. Multi-slide asks are fine for a first draft, but the attention per slide is thinner. Build the deck broad, then refine slide by slide.
“Use the attached transcript”, “pull the figures from q3-actuals.csv”, “research this on the web”. Without a named source Pretty will choose one for you, and the difference between reading your file and searching the web is the difference between right and plausible.
Colours, column counts, tone, length, what must stay on one line, what must not change. These are cheap to say and expensive to fix later.

Prompts that work

A market-sizing slide, grounded in a file you attached:
Why it works: one slide, one named source, the exact figures identified, and it says what the footer should be rather than hoping for one. Editing what is already on the slide, with the shapes selected first:
Why it works: the selection badge scopes it to those shapes, the limit is a number rather than “shorter”, and the last sentence protects everything you did not mention. A chart from numbers you paste in:
Why it works: the data is unambiguous, the emphasis is explicit, and asking for a takeaway title gets you a sentence instead of a label. A first draft of several slides:
Why it works: it names each slide, so the plan Pretty builds matches the deck you had in mind, and the last clause rules out a whole category of output you did not want.

When Pretty asks you something back

If your request has a fork in it that changes the whole slide, Pretty stops and asks rather than guessing. The row is labelled Asking you, and a card appears above the composer with your question, two to four options, and an Other box for a free-text answer. Pretty pre-selects its recommendation. Pick it or override it; the turn resumes from your answer.
Getting asked a lot is a signal your prompts are underspecified. The answers you keep typing into Other are usually the constraint that belonged in the original message.

Multi-slide asks and the plan

When one request spans more than one slide, Pretty opens a visible task plan first. The step row reads Planning steps. There is one task per slide, named for what that slide needs, and statuses move through pending, in progress and completed as it works. A task can also end cancelled if the plan changes mid-run. Watch the plan. It is the earliest point where you can see Pretty misread your brief. If slide three is described wrongly in the plan, say so straight away rather than waiting for it to be built.
Single-slide work does not get a plan, even when it takes many steps. The discovery, the change and the check all belong to the one slide.