PPTX

What it does

Activates whenever a .pptx file is involved — as input, output, or both. Claude routes to the right sub-workflow: markitdown for text extraction, a template-unpack-edit-repack flow for modifying existing decks, and pptxgenjs for building new presentations from scratch. It also enforces a design checklist (color palette, typography, layout variety) and a mandatory visual QA loop that renders slides to images and inspects them for overlap, overflow, and low contrast. Most useful when the user wants a finished deck rather than raw content they’ll paste into PowerPoint themselves.

Use cases

• Generate a pitch deck from a brief — supply an outline or product doc and get a designed 8-15 slide .pptx with a topic-appropriate color palette, varied layouts, and stat callouts, not plain bulleted lists.
• Edit an existing branded template — unpack a corporate template, swap in new content across all slides while preserving master layouts, speaker notes, and theme colors, then repack.
• Extract slide content for reuse — pull clean text out of a .pptx (including speaker notes) to summarize a deck, feed it into an email, or convert it to markdown for a docs site.

When to use it

• The user mentions a deck, slides, presentation, or a .pptx filename
• You need to produce a .pptx file as output rather than describing slides in prose
• An existing PowerPoint needs to be modified, split, merged, or have its content extracted
• The workflow involves templates, speaker notes, or slide-level comments

When NOT to use it

• The user wants Google Slides or Keynote — this skill only outputs .pptx
• You only need to draft slide copy or an outline; write markdown instead of invoking the toolchain
• The environment lacks LibreOffice and Poppler, which the visual QA loop requires
• The task is a single-slide graphic where a design tool (Figma, Canva) would be more direct

Installation

/plugin install pptx@anthropic-agent-skills

If you haven’t added the Anthropic marketplace yet, run this first:

/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills

After install, just mention it in conversation:

Use the pptx skill to turn the notes in pitch-outline.md into a 10-slide investor deck with a Midnight Executive color palette.

Troubleshooting

Leftover placeholder text like “Lorem ipsum” or “XXXX” appears in the final deck Run python -m markitdown output.pptx | grep -iE "xxxx|lorem|ipsum|this.*(page|slide).*layout" after generation. Template placeholders often survive edits because they live in shapes you didn’t touch. Fix each hit and re-grep before shipping.

Decorative lines or shapes overlap wrapped titles and body text The skill warns that a title styled for one line breaks the moment it wraps to two. Regenerate slide images with pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 output.pdf slide and inspect with a subagent — the QA prompt in the skill explicitly looks for this. Either shorten the title, widen the text box, or drop the underline (the skill flags accent lines under titles as an AI tell anyway).

Icons or text are invisible against the background Low-contrast pairings (light gray text on cream, dark icons on dark backgrounds) are one of the QA checklist items. Put icons inside a filled colored circle to guarantee separation, or swap the text color to match the dominant palette’s contrast tone. Re-render just the affected slide with pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 -f N -l N output.pdf slide-fixed.

soffice or pdftoppm is not found when converting slides to images The QA loop depends on LibreOffice and Poppler. Install them at the system level (brew install libreoffice poppler on macOS, or the equivalent apt packages on Linux). The skill’s scripts/office/soffice.py wrapper handles sandboxed environments, but the binaries themselves must be on PATH.