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Comment by bs7280 | Hacker News Reader

What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter.

If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.

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This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes.

https://github.com/pseudosavant/markdown-pptx/

For those that are interested, this inspired me to create a tool just for exporting images and PDFs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Check out the repo below, or if you have uv installed just run `uvx office-export skill install` or `uvx office-export --help` to check it out.

It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet.

https://github.com/pseudosavant/office-export

Thanks for sharing, now im wondering if they did in fact grant my wish since I messed with this in January. Im lucky my job does not require me to make any pptx presentations.

I have made puppt cli for this, it includes high dpi rendering per-slide/all-slides and in place editing

https://github.com/artpar/puppt

it allows your llms to see the ppt files structurally apart from just rendering it

Cool project! I'm playing around with some similar stuff, but via uv/Python. Impressive you aren't leveraging any other existing libraries for OpenXML parsing, editing, or rendering. Any especially tricky gotchas you've run into for this tool?

Yeah thanks to LLM hill climbing and PPTs being easily available and they being nothing more than just xmls this did not involve any gotchas, just a about a weeks worth of goal chasing with manual verification. I did have to stop LLM into hardcoding a lot of times trying to escape the actual goal.

But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.

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