When to Use
Use when the main artifact is a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or .pptx deck, especially when layouts, templates, placeholders, notes, comments, charts, extraction, editing, or final visual quality matter.
Core Rules
1. Choose the workflow before touching the deck
- Reading text, editing an existing deck, rebuilding from a template, and creating from scratch are different jobs with different failure modes.
- For text extraction or inspection, read the deck before editing it.
- Text extraction plus thumbnail-style visual inspection is safer than editing from shape assumptions alone.
- For template-driven work, inventory the deck before replacing content.
- For deep edits, remember a
.pptxfile is OOXML with separate parts for slides, layouts, masters, media, notes, and comments. - If a template exists, template fidelity beats generic slide-design instincts.
- Reusing or duplicating a good existing slide is often safer than rebuilding it and hoping the theme still matches.
2. Inventory the deck before replacing content
- Count the reusable layouts, real placeholders, notes, comments, media, and recurring typography or color patterns first.
- Placeholder indexes and layout indexes are not portable assumptions.
- Inspect the actual slide or template before targeting title, body, chart, or image shapes.
- Speaker notes, comments, and linked assets can live outside the visible slide surface.
- A missing or wrong placeholder target can silently land content in the wrong box or wrong layer.
- Master and layout settings can override local slide edits, so the visible problem is not always on the slide you are editing.
3. Match content to the actual placeholders
- Count the actual content pieces before choosing a layout.
- Pick layouts based on the real number of ideas, columns, images, or charts the slide needs.
- Do not force two ideas into a three-column slide or cram dense text under a chart.
- Category counts and data series lengths must match or charts will break in ugly ways.
- Explicit sizing beats wishful thinking: text boxes, images, and charts need real space, not "it should fit".
- Do not choose a layout with more placeholders than the content can meaningfully fill.
- Quote layouts are for real quotes, and image-led layouts are for slides that actually have images.
- For chart-, table-, or image-heavy slides, full-slide or two-column layouts are usually safer than stacking dense text above the visual.
4. Preserve the deck's visual language
- Theme, master, and layout files usually decide fonts, colors, and hierarchy more than any one slide does.
- Start from the deck's actual theme, fonts, spacing, and aspect ratio instead of improvising a new style.
- Reuse the deck's own alignment and spacing system instead of inventing a second visual language.
- Use common fonts for portability and strong contrast for readability.
- Preserve the template's visual logic first; originality matters less than not breaking the deck's existing language.
- Combining slides from multiple sources requires normalizing themes, masters, and alignment afterward.
5. Run content QA and visual QA separately
- Text overflow, bad alignment, clipped shapes, weak contrast, and placeholder leftovers are normal first-pass failures.
- Run both content QA and visual QA; missing text and broken layout are different failure classes.
- Render or inspect the actual deck output before delivery when layout matters.
- Search for leftover template junk, sample labels, and placeholder text before calling the deck finished.
- Check notes, comments, labels, legends, and chart/table semantics separately from the visual pass.
- A deck can pass text extraction and still fail on overlap, clipping, wrong theme inheritance, or broken notes.
- Thumbnail grids and rendered slides usually reveal layout bugs faster than code or text inspection.
- Assume the first render is wrong and do at least one fix-and-verify cycle before calling the deck finished.
- Re-check affected slides after each fix because one spacing change often creates another issue.
6. Keep decks portable and review-safe
- Template masters can override direct edits in surprising ways.
- Complex effects may degrade across PowerPoint, LibreOffice, and conversion pipelines, so keep important content robust without them.
- Image sizing, font substitution, and placeholder mismatch are common reasons a deck looks good in code and bad on screen.
- Notes, comments, linked media, and merged decks can stay broken even when the visible slide looks fine.
Common Traps
- Placeholder text and sample charts often survive template reuse if not explicitly replaced.
- Directly editing one slide can fail if the real issue lives in the master or layout.
- Charts, icons, and text boxes need enough space; near-collisions are usually visible only after rendering.
- Layout indexes vary by template, so built-in assumptions from one deck often break in another.
- A missing placeholder or wrong shape target can silently put content in the wrong place.
- Counting the text ideas after choosing the layout usually leads to empty placeholders, weak hierarchy, or leftover template junk.
- Font substitution can move line breaks and wreck careful spacing.
- Speaker notes, comments, and linked media can stay broken even when the visible slide looks fine.
- A deck can pass text inspection and still fail visually because of overlap, contrast, or edge clipping.
- Editing from one slide alone can miss the real source of truth in the theme, master, or layout definitions.
- Choosing a quote, comparison, or multi-column layout without matching content usually makes the deck look templated rather than intentional.
- Combining or duplicating slides without checking masters and themes can create subtle inconsistency slide by slide.
- Aspect-ratio mismatches like
16:9versus4:3can shift every placement decision even when each slide looks locally reasonable.
Related Skills
Install with clawhub install <slug> if user confirms:
- documents — Document workflows that often feed presentation content.
- design — Visual direction and layout decisions.
- brief — Concise business messaging for slide narratives.
Feedback
- If useful:
clawhub star powerpoint-pptx - Stay updated:
clawhub sync
