ppt-cli

The presentation on your screen—streamed to your LLM. No save, no path, no handoff. One command reads what you're editing; another writes it back. Your terminal and PowerPoint finally speak the same language.

Why ppt-cli?

Your LLM can't see the deck you're staring at. You copy-paste, juggle paths, or give up. ppt-cli hooks into the active presentation—the one with the cursor blinking—and pipes it straight to stdout. Your AI reads live content, returns edits as JSON, and you apply them with a single update call. The deck you're editing is the only source of truth.

Why CLI instead of MCP? No server to run, no protocol to configure. Any tool that can run a shell command can use ppt-cli—your IDE, a script, a cron job, or an LLM that simply executes ppt get-content. Pipe the output, grep it, feed it to any model. CLI is universal; MCP locks you into its ecosystem.

Install

Clone the repo, then:

cd ppt-cli
uv tool install .

Quick Start

1. Open a PowerPoint presentation.
2. Run ppt get-content --active --slides All to read slide text.
3. Have your LLM produce edits as JSON.
4. Run ppt update --active --content-file edits.json to apply changes.

Usage

General

ppt --help

usage: ppt [-h] [-v] command ...

PowerPoint CLI for LLM. Read and update slide content via win32com on Windows. Outputs JSON by default for easy parsing. Commands: get-content, get-active-text, update, list-slides.

positional arguments:
  command
    get-content      Get slide content as JSON
    get-active-text  Get selected textboxes with UUID keys
    update           Update text in slides
    list-slides      List slides with content summary

options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose      Enable verbose logging to stderr

Use 'ppt <command> --help' for detailed help on each command.

Commands

Command	Description
get-content	Get slide content as JSON (MCP: get_ppt_content)
get-active-text	Get selected textboxes with UUID keys (MCP: get_active_text_content)
update	Update text in slides (MCP: update_ppt_content)
list-slides	List slides with content summary

Examples

Get content from active presentation (current slide):

ppt get-content --active --slides Current

Get content from file:

ppt get-content --file C:\path\to\presentation.pptx --slides 1,2,3

Get selected textboxes (user must have text selected in PowerPoint):

ppt get-active-text --active

Update content:

ppt update --active --content "{\"1\": {\"Title_1_1\": \"New Title\"}}"

Or from file:

ppt update --active --content-file updates.json

LLM Usage

• All commands output JSON to stdout by default (except list-slides which is human-readable).
• Use --output FILE to write JSON to a file.
• Errors are written as {"error": "..."} to stderr with exit code 1.
• Use --verbose for debug logs to stderr.

Output Format

get-content (default): Outputs actual text content. Keys are text identifiers; values are the real slide text.

{
  "1": {"Title": "My Title", "Subtitle": "My Subtitle"},
  "2": {"Title_2_1": "Slide 2 Title"}
}

get-content --with-placeholders: Outputs {key: "spaceholder"} format for building update input. Use when the LLM needs the exact keys for update.

{
  "1": {"Title_1_1": "spaceholder", "Subtitle": "spaceholder"},
  "2": {"Title_2_1": "spaceholder"}
}

Keys like Title_1_1 mean the first occurrence of "Title" with UUID suffix. Use these exact keys in update.

update input:

{
  "1": {"Title_1_1": "New Title"},
  "2": {"Subtitle": "Updated text"}
}

Use "spaceholder" as value to keep existing text unchanged.

Requirements

• Windows (PowerPoint + pywin32 COM automation)
• Python >= 3.10