pptx

An agent skill by anthropics, from anthropics/skills. Tags: anthropic, design, documents, office, slides.

What it does

Use this skill any time a .pptx or .potx file is involved in any way — as input, output, or both. This includes: creating slide decks, pitch decks, or presentations; reading, parsing, or extracting text from any .pptx or .potx file (even if the extracted content will be used elsewhere, like in an email or summary); editing, modifying, or updating existing presentations; combining or splitting slide files; working with templates (.potx), layouts, speaker notes, or comments. Trigger whenever the user mentions "deck," "slides," "presentation," or references a .pptx or .potx filename, regardless of what they plan to do with the content afterward. If a .pptx or .potx file needs to be opened, created, or touched, use this skill.

Install

With the skills CLI, which installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents:

npx skills add anthropics/skills --skill pptx

Or copy the skill folder into Claude Code's skills directory by hand (~/.claude/skills for every project, or .claude/skills inside one):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills
cp -r skills/skills/pptx ~/.claude/skills/pptx

Safety box score

Grade C, moderate risk: 32 of 100 risk points, rated 2026-09-21. The grade rates what the skill and its scripts can reach on the machine of whoever installs it, across eight categories from shell execution to secrets access. How the score works.

This skill works entirely on local PowerPoint packages: it unzips/rezips `.pptx`/`.potx` files, edits slide XML, validates them, and renders previews through LibreOffice. The main risks are local file mutation/deletion and invoking native tooling (`soffice`, `gcc`, `git`, `pdftoppm`), including an optional LD_PRELOAD shim for LibreOffice.

Category levels, from 0 (none) to 3 (high)
Category	Level	Why
Code & shell execution	2 (moderate)	It runs external programs with `subprocess.run([...])` for `soffice`, `gcc`, `git`, and `pdftoppm`, so using the skill executes native host tools.
Network access	0 (none)	No HTTP clients, downloads, or remote uploads are present; `urllib.parse.unquote` is only local string parsing.
Filesystem reach	2 (moderate)	The tools unpack, rewrite, and delete package contents; `add_slide.py` can rewrite the input deck in place, `clean.py` deletes orphaned parts, and `validate.py --auto-repair` writes fixes back.
Secrets & credentials	0 (none)	Nothing reads tokens, passwords, keychains, browser sessions, or `.env` files.
Privilege & persistence	2 (moderate)	`scripts/office/soffice.py` may compile a shared object and set `LD_PRELOAD` before launching LibreOffice, changing process loading behavior without sudo.
Instruction hijack surface	0 (none)	The files do not fetch or embed alternate instructions to follow, skip confirmations, or hide actions.
Irreversible actions	1 (low)	The tools can delete or overwrite the user’s local deck files, but they do not publish, send, pay, deploy, or otherwise act outside the machine.
Transparency	1 (low)	A native helper is generated at runtime from `_SHIM_SOURCE` and compiled with `gcc`, so part of the behavior depends on on-the-fly native code generation even though the source is readable.

Before installing

Read `scripts/office/soffice.py` first if your environment is restricted; it can compile `/tmp/lo_socket_shim.so` and preload it.
Make a copy of any real deck before using `scripts/add_slide.py`, `scripts/clean.py`, or `validate.py --auto-repair`; they can overwrite or delete package parts.
If you only want a preview, run `scripts/thumbnail.py` in a scratch directory and set a unique output prefix instead of relying on the default `thumbnails`.

Rated 2026-09-21 by an automated review of 17 files from the skill's repository.

Source

Repository: anthropics/skills (all skills from this repository)
Path: skills/pptx/SKILL.md
Branch: main
Updated: 2026-09-19

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