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Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

This is a great read. One of the most requested AI features I’ve seen is PPTX slide generation that matches a corporate template and assets perfectly. Claude with skills comes close but not close enough. The amount of fiddling needed to adjust is nearly equal to doing it yourself from scratch. It’s a very tricky standard to work with!

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Didn't use AI for it, but had similar request for our team and we found it easier to build a tool that checks against our defined style-guide and auto-fixes what it can as opposed to generating and reporting on other violations of style guide. The idea was similar to latex, don't think about design while creating and let the tool flag / enforce the style-guide and design, and reviewers don't need to focus so much on what's wrong with slides and can pretty much focus on content

We use a simple PowerShell script to run the check (you can interact with any office doc as a ComApplication object) and it took only a few hours of digging through the properties / MS docs to get what we needed.

How do you check style via PowerShell? You’ve pulled me in.

As in how to interact with office docs programmatically? It's in the second text blurb, you can make a new COM object. For example new Excel Workbook:

  $excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application

From there you have full access to all parts of the document as properties & can call whatever methods are available to edit the document.

As for how we enforce style guide on a presentation, each slide runs through a workflow checking the various style-guide rules that we have / corporate has

- Ensure correct template is used

- Set and enforce correct font

- Check text boxes for font size to check verbosity / readability

- Flag / remove animations (not accessible)

- Flag images without alt-text

and so on

for a 300 slide new release presentation, it takes about 45 seconds for the script to process and auto-fixes what makes sense to auto-fix (e.g., wrong fonts) and adds comments / generates report on what needs to be reviewed and adjusted

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