Powerpoint

Powerpoint Skill

Create, inspect, and edit PowerPoint (.pptx) presentations using the python-pptx library. Five helper scripts cover deck creation from a JSON spec, structured read-back, in-place edits, template-driven brand decks, and slide rendering — all offline, no PowerPoint installation required.

When to Use

• The user asks to build a slide deck, report presentation, or pitch deck.
• You need to extract text, notes, tables, chart data, or images from a .pptx someone shared.
• You need to update an existing deck: replace text, refresh or patch chart data, swap a logo, duplicate/remove/reorder slides, set backgrounds, footers, hyperlinks, or speaker notes.
• You must produce an on-brand deck from a company .pptx template.
• Do NOT use this for .ppt (legacy binary) files — convert them first with soffice --convert-to pptx old.ppt if LibreOffice is available.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+ with python-pptx installed (pip install python-pptx).
• Optional: LibreOffice (soffice) plus poppler (pdftoppm or pdftocairo) for rendering slides to PNGs and for PDF export. pptx_render.py detects both with shutil.which and degrades gracefully (reports {"rendered": false, "missing": [...]}, exit 0) when absent — all create/read/edit operations work without them.
• Check availability via terminal: python -c "import pptx; print(pptx.__version__)" and which soffice pdftoppm.

How to Run

All scripts live in scripts/, take --help, print JSON to stdout, and exit non-zero on failure. Run them with terminal:

python scripts/pptx_create.py deck.json out.pptx
python scripts/pptx_read.py deck.pptx --outline      # full JSON outline
python scripts/pptx_read.py deck.pptx --notes        # speaker notes
python scripts/pptx_read.py deck.pptx --images ./img # export pictures
python scripts/pptx_edit.py deck.pptx --replace-text "Old Corp" "New Corp"
python scripts/pptx_edit.py deck.pptx --chart-data update.json
python scripts/pptx_edit.py deck.pptx --duplicate-slide 2
python scripts/pptx_edit.py deck.pptx --remove-slide 3 --move-slide 2 0
python scripts/pptx_from_template.py brand.pptx out.pptx --values vals.json
python scripts/pptx_render.py deck.pptx --outdir ./render  # slide PNGs

Author JSON specs with write_file; inspect script output and generated JSON with read_file.

Quick Reference

Procedure

1. Create a deck

Write a JSON spec (see pptx_create.py --help for the full format), then run pptx_create.py. Per slide you can set: layout (title, title_content, section, two_content, title_only, blank), title, subtitle, bullets (strings, or dicts with level 0-4, size pt, bold, italic, font, color hex, link URL for a hyperlink), background (solid hex), footer (text; enables the layout's footer placeholder), slide_number (true; enables the layout's slide-number placeholder), images (path + left/top/width/height in inches), tables (rows as list-of-lists), shapes (rectangle, rounded_rectangle, oval, diamond, right_arrow, chevron, with fill hex + optional text), charts (bar, bar_h, line, pie with categories + series), and notes (speaker notes).

2. Read a deck

pptx_read.py deck.pptx --outline returns slide size, layout inventory, and per slide: layout name, all shape texts, table cells, image inventory (filename/ext/bytes), chart categories/series/values, and speaker notes. Use --images DIR to dump embedded pictures to files, then vision_analyze on any exported image if you need to see its content.

3. Edit a deck

pptx_edit.py combines operations in one pass; use --output to keep the original. Text replacement scans slide shapes, table cells, and notes. Image swap retargets the picture's relationship id so position and size are preserved. Slide removal drops the relationship and the <p:sldId> entry; reorder moves the <p:sldId> element within <p:sldIdLst> (python-pptx has no public API for either — the script does the XML-level work). --duplicate-slide N appends an independent deep copy of slide N: shape XML plus image/media/hyperlink relationships are cloned and rIds remapped, so editing the copy never touches the original. Chart slides are refused (see Pitfalls). --set-notes/--append-notes edit speaker notes; --set-background, --hyperlink, --enable-slide-number, and --set-footer handle deck polish.

Chart updates take a JSON spec via --chart-data. Full replace: {"slide": 0, "chart": 0, "categories": [...], "series": {...}}. For surgical edits, pass "ops" instead — a list of {"op": "update_series", "name": ..., "values": [...]}, add_series, remove_series, rename_category (from/to or index), and set_title. python-pptx can only swap a chart's entire dataset (replace_data), so ops are implemented as read-existing → modify → replace; the per-part UX is a wrapper, and any chart data not expressible as categories + numeric series will be normalized by the round-trip.

4. Build from a template

pptx_from_template.py opens a brand .pptx, replaces every {{token}} from a values JSON across slides/tables/notes, and can append new slides that use the template's own layouts (by layout name or index) so they inherit the master's fonts and colors. Tip: to start from a template with zero slides, delete existing ones afterward with pptx_edit.py --remove-slide.

5. Visual verification

pptx_render.py deck.pptx --outdir ./render converts the deck to PDF with soffice --headless and splits it into one PNG per slide with pdftoppm (or pdftocairo). Output JSON lists the PNG paths — review each with vision_analyze. When either tool is missing the script exits 0 with {"rendered": false, "missing": [...]} and guidance; fall back to the JSON outline from pptx_read.py, which verifies content and structure, just not visuals.

Converting to PDF

If LibreOffice is installed, export the finished deck to PDF directly:

soffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir ./out deck.pptx

The output lands at ./out/deck.pdf. Fonts not installed on the host are substituted, so render-verify (Procedure step 5) before shipping the PDF. There is no offline pure-Python .pptx→PDF path; if soffice is absent, say so rather than approximating.

Pitfalls

• Run splitting: PowerPoint fragments paragraph text into runs at spell-check and edit boundaries. --replace-text first merges adjacent runs whose formatting is identical, so matches split across such runs are replaced with formatting fully preserved. Only when a match spans genuinely differently-formatted runs is the paragraph rewritten with