Engagements in slide notes

The block

[pulse:<kind> <attrs>]
<prompt line(s)>
- option
- option *
[/pulse]

• <kind> is poll, quiz, or icebreaker.
• The first non-option line(s) are the prompt. Lines starting with - are options; a trailing * marks a correct option (quiz).
• An engagement needs a prompt and at least two options, or the block is ignored.

Attributes (all optional)

Examples

[pulse:quiz trigger=exit]
Which planet is largest?
- Mars
- Jupiter *
- Venus
[/pulse]

[pulse:poll results=afterClose]
How are you feeling?
- Great
- Okay
- Tired
[/pulse]

[pulse:icebreaker]
Coffee or tea?
- Coffee
- Tea
[/pulse]

Prepare the room — “engagement coming” notices

Audiences (and presenters) respond better when they can see an engagement approaching. Place a small notice at the bottom of the slide that runs the engagement — or the slide just before it — so people can get their phones ready. Pulse ships a ready-made badge per engagement type; drop the matching image onto the slide:

(Or write your own line — e.g. ▸ Poll coming — get your phone ready.) These are visual cues only; the engagement itself still fires from its [pulse:…] block, on trigger=enter or trigger=exit.

To show the live results on a slide (a bar chart / word cloud / reactions that update as the room responds), embed a Pulse live frame — see Show live results on a slide.

The exit survey (closing slide)

The whole post-event survey travels the same way — one block on the deck's closing (last) slide notes. Each line is a question ending in a (type …) marker; - lines are the options for the choice/multi question above them.

[pulse:survey]
How would you rate this session? (rating 10)
Which parts landed? (multi)
- The live demo
- The Q&A
- The slides
Would you recommend us? (choice)
- Yes
- No
Anything else? (text)
[/pulse]

• Types: rating (1–N; default 5, override with (rating 10)), choice (pick one), multi (pick many), text (free write-in). No recognized marker ⇒ rating.
• choice/multi need at least two - options, else that question is dropped.
• Ids ride along as (rating id=…) when Pulse exported the survey — leave them off when authoring new.
• One survey per deck; if a survey block appears on more than one slide, the one on the last slide wins.
• Re-import replaces the session's survey — except once attendees have started answering it, when it's left untouched so responses aren't orphaned.
• Copy the current survey out of Pulse from the console (Post-event survey → Copy for slide notes) and paste it onto the closing slide.

Beyond engagements — titles, acts, and preferences

A deck's notes can build a whole event, not just engagements:

• Slide titles — Pulse reads each slide's title placeholder to name it in the run-of-show (no block needed).
• [pulse:act title="…" speaker="…" minutes=N] on a section's first slide — builds an agenda segment; acts rebuild the run-of-show timeline.
• [pulse:session key=value …] on the title slide — sets event preferences (view=classic|overlay, overlay options, room toggles, control-size, wind-down, passcode, …). Unknown keys are ignored.

Full grammar + an AI authoring workflow: Author an enriched deck with AI.

Rules

• Multiple blocks per slide are fine.
• A malformed block is skipped — it never fails your deck upload.
• A block whose id matches an existing engagement updates it (its content only while it's still a draft — Pulse never rewrites an engagement that has already run). A block with no id creates a new draft.
• Pulse never deletes an engagement just because it's missing from a deck.
• The add-in can also write a machine tag via Sync to slides — you don't edit that by hand. Humans and AIs write notes; PowerPoint's API can't let an add-in write notes for you.