PowerPoint (pptx) skill

With this skill turned on, asking Claude for “a 10-slide deck on our Q3 results” gets you a real .pptx file, not slide text to paste. The skill holds Anthropic’s instructions and scripts for PowerPoint work; Claude reads it only when a deck is involved.

What it does (plain English)

The skill splits deck work into three routes:

Task	Route the skill uses
New deck from scratch	Writes a pptxgenjs script that generates the slides
Edit a deck or build from a template	Unzips the file and edits each slide’s XML directly
Read a deck	markitdown prints the text, one block per slide; thumbnail.py draws a labeled grid of every slide

It also carries design guidance: ten named color palettes with hex codes (for example “Midnight Executive” navy, ice blue and white), a type scale (titles 36 to 44 pt, body 14 to 16 pt, captions 10 to 12 pt), spacing rules and a list of common mistakes.

The part that matters most for quality is a required QA pass. Claude renders the deck to images and looks at it, checks text for leftover placeholders such as “lorem ipsum” or “[insert”, and runs a validator script that checks the file’s structure. The skill states plainly that the first render usually has real problems, such as overlaps and overflow, and tells Claude to fix them before stopping.

Is it for you?

Pick it if you make decks regularly and you are tired of copying text into slides yourself. It is a good match for internal updates, pitch drafts, training material and “make this document into slides” jobs.

It is less useful if your company requires a pixel-exact brand template that only a designer touches, or if you need charts in Google Slides (that is a separate connector with its own limits).

What you can do with it

1. Outline to deck. “Here is my outline. Make a 12-slide deck using the Teal Trust palette, one idea per slide, speaker notes on each.”
2. Use your template. “Build the board update in our template.pptx.” The skill makes a thumbnail grid of the template’s layouts, picks layouts, duplicates slides with a helper script and cleans out unused ones.
3. Fix a messy deck. “Reorder these slides, delete 4 and 9, and fix any text that overflows.” Reordering is an edit to one list in the presentation file.
4. Extract content. “Summarize this 40-slide deck into a one-page brief.” The skill reads the deck as text first, slide by slide.
5. Check before sending. “Validate this deck and tell me if anything will break in PowerPoint.” The skill’s validator names a fix for every failure it finds.

How to set it up

claude.ai or the Claude desktop app

1. Open Settings > Capabilities and turn on Code execution and file creation.
2. Go to Customize > Skills. The document skills are listed under From Anthropic & Partners and switch on automatically when relevant.
3. Attach your outline or template and ask for a PowerPoint file.

If you are on a Team or Enterprise plan and the setting is missing, an Owner has to enable code execution and skills under Organization settings > Capabilities.

Claude Code

1. Run /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
2. Run /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills and choose who gets it (you, the project, or this repo only).
3. Ask: “Use the pptx skill to turn plan.md into a deck.”

That plugin also installs the docx, xlsx and pdf skills. We ran both commands in Claude Code 2.1.302 on 2026-10-18; they completed and the plugin listed four skills. We did not generate a deck in that test.

Watch out for

• License. The pptx folder is source-available, not open source. Its LICENSE.txt forbids copying it outside Anthropic’s services, making derivative works and redistributing it.
• Local software in Claude Code. The skill expects pptxgenjs (npm), Python packages markitdown[pptx], Pillow, defusedxml and lxml, plus LibreOffice and Poppler. Install them if a step fails on your machine.
• Charts. The skill warns that pptxgenjs can produce chart XML that PowerPoint refuses to open even though other tools accept it. Open chart-heavy decks in real PowerPoint before you present.
• Template errors you did not cause. Some templates already break the file schema. The skill tells Claude to validate against the original template so those inherited errors do not get blamed on the new deck.
• Context cost. Claude Code’s claude plugin details estimates about 7.9k tokens each time this skill loads, the most of the four document skills.

Alternatives

• Google Slides connector for decks that must stay in Google Drive.
• Canvas design skill for a single poster-style visual rather than a slide deck.
• Word documents skill when the content reads better as a document than as slides.