Generating Slide Decks

Generating slide decks

Never hand-write .pptx — build it with python-pptx.

pip install python-pptx

from pptx import Presentation
from pptx.util import Inches

prs = Presentation()
slide = prs.slides.add_slide(prs.slide_layouts[1])  # title + content
slide.shapes.title.text = "Q3 Results"
slide.placeholders[1].text_frame.text = "Revenue up 18% QoQ"

# bare content slide
blank = prs.slides.add_slide(prs.slide_layouts[6])
box = blank.shapes.add_textbox(Inches(0.5), Inches(0.5), Inches(9), Inches(1))
box.text_frame.text = "Custom layout"

prs.save("/home/user/deck.pptx")

Keep to 1 idea per slide, a real title on every slide, and don't cram paragraphs into a placeholder — bullet points, short. For a chart on a slide, generate it as a PNG first (see visualizing-data) and place it with slide.shapes.add_picture(path, Inches(1), Inches(2), width=Inches(6)) rather than building a native pptx chart object.

Write the build script with write_file, run it with shell, then present_file the .pptx.