Slides are the tool of persuasion — and one of the hardest formats to get right with AI. Misplaced coordinates, lost fonts, and corrupted charts can sink a presentation. Anthropic's official PPTX Skill lets Claude Code and compatible agents generate native, editable, well-formed decks — and also read and reassemble any existing one.
What it covers: build, edit, read, notes
Generate professional decks: create slides from scratch with pptxgenjs, controlling layout, palette, and alignment; charts stay native (editable) PowerPoint charts, not flattened images
Edit existing presentations: unzip and edit slide XML directly; build from templates (.potx/.pptx), reuse layouts, insert icons
Read & parse: extract text and structure from any .pptx (markitdown outputs per-slide blocks), and render thumbnail grids for a quick visual scan of every slide
Merge & split: duplicate slides, delete or reorder pages (with all package relationships intact), and combine across decks
Speaker notes: write per-slide notes so the deck is presentation-ready
Under the hood: pptxgenjs + a native XML pipeline
The skill picks the right tool per task: creating uses pptxgenjs (an intuitive Node library); editing/templates unzips and edits ppt/slides/slideN.xml; reading uses markitdown plus a thumbnail script. Its engineering value is the anti-footgun layer: colors must omit the # prefix, shadow offsets cannot be negative, stacked-chart data label positions cannot be outEnd, and combo charts must declare dual axes — each of these can corrupt a file. A built-in validate.py checks everything before delivery and names the fix for each issue.
Typical use cases
Pitch deck generation: have AI turn proposal points into a clear, consistent pitch deck
Template-based customization: generate project updates from a company .potx template with consistent brand visuals
Deck reassembly: pull relevant slides from multiple historical decks into a new presentation
Document-to-slides: turn report or paper points into slides with speaker notes
How to use & download
Claude Code users: drop the skills/pptx directory into your project's .claude/skills/ folder. Then describe the task naturally ("turn this proposal into a 10-page deck") and the agent handles the rest. Full source: official GitHub repo.
Other agent users: follows the standard SKILL.md convention, compatible with any Agent Skills–supporting toolchain. Official docs: Anthropic Agent Skills documentation.
Related resources
Combine it with the rest of the document-processing quartet: PDF skill (pdf), Word skill (docx), and Excel skill (xlsx). For AI-generated editable PPTX, also check out PPT Master.