pptx

name	pptx
description	Use for PowerPoint tasks where a .pptx deck is read, created, edited, reformatted, compared, or validated, including slide layouts, placeholders, theme styles, speaker notes, images, charts, and reference-format matching.

PPTX Presentations

When To Use

Use this skill whenever the task touches a slide deck. The main challenge is preserving slide layout and visual intent while making deterministic content or formatting changes.

First Pass

1. Generate a visual and textual inventory: slide count, titles, layouts, placeholders, speaker notes, images, charts, and theme colors.
2. If a reference deck exists, treat it as the source of truth for typography, colors, spacing, and element placement.
3. Decide whether to edit existing XML, use python-pptx, or create from scratch with pptxgenjs.
4. Keep slide IDs and order stable unless the task asks for structural changes.

Implementation Patterns

Inspect Deck Text and Structure

A .pptx file is a ZIP archive. To audit content without extra tooling, unzip and read the relevant XML directly:

unzip -p deck.pptx ppt/slides/slide1.xml | head -c 2000
unzip -l deck.pptx | grep -E '(slides|notesSlides|media)/'

Inspect ppt/slides/slide*.xml, ppt/notesSlides/, and the media relationships under ppt/slides/_rels/ to map shapes to images.

Edit Existing Shapes

Use shape names, placeholder types, or text patterns rather than coordinates alone. Coordinates are useful for validation but brittle for selecting content.

Assigning to shape.text collapses all runs in the text frame into one run and discards per-run font, size, color, bold/italic. Edit at the run level instead so the first run keeps its formatting:

from pptx import Presentation

prs = Presentation("input.pptx")
for slide in prs.slides:
    for shape in slide.shapes:
        if not shape.has_text_frame:
            continue
        for para in shape.text_frame.paragraphs:
            full = "".join(r.text for r in para.runs)
            if "{{TITLE}}" not in full:
                continue
            new_text = full.replace("{{TITLE}}", "Quarterly Results")
            if para.runs:
                para.runs[0].text = new_text
                for run in para.runs[1:]:
                    run.text = ""
prs.save("output.pptx")

When replacing images, preserve crop, size, and z-order. When changing text, preserve paragraph and run formatting unless the task asks for a new style.

Reference Formatting

For format-transfer tasks:

• compare title/body font family, size, color, bold/italic, alignment;
• compare fills, outlines, chart styles, and table banding;
• copy layout-level defaults before shape-level overrides;
• validate by reopening the saved deck and re-reading XML, not only by eyeballing text.

Validation

• Reopen the saved deck and confirm slide count, order, expected text, and media.
• Re-read ppt/slides/slide*.xml and compare against reference structure.
• Check that required placeholders were replaced and no template markers remain.
• For layout tasks, inspect coordinates and sizes for key shapes.

Common Failures

• Recreating slides and losing master/theme relationships.
• Editing visible text while leaving speaker notes or comments stale.
• Using shape.text = ... and silently flattening runs / killing formatting.
• Matching content but missing reference formatting.
• Breaking image relationships when replacing media.