PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick

A read-only PowerPoint viewer for Visual Studio Code with the same compact, native-feeling workflow as PDF Viewer Sidekick. It opens presentations from local folders, Remote SSH, WSL, Dev Containers, virtual workspaces, and other VS Code filesystem providers without copying them to a local path or uploading them to a service.

Current features

• Default read-only editor for .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, and .potx
• Continuous slide scrolling with windowed rendering near the viewport
• PowerPoint-style slide overview with resizable, lazy previews and keyboard navigation
• Previous, next, direct-slide, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down navigation
• Full-presentation text search with snippets, match-case and whole-word modes
• Active search-result highlighting on the rendered slide
• Lazy slide thumbnails and an automatically derived slide-title outline
• Fit-slide, fit-width, preset, custom, Ctrl/Cmd+wheel, and double-click zoom
• Clockwise rotation
• Selectable rendered text
• Embedded SVG pictures, including PowerPoint's newer asvg:svgBlip format
• Animated slides shown at their final static stage: entrances are visible, exits are hidden, and supported motion, rotation, and scale effects use their endpoints
• Local-font detection with a missing-font indicator and automatic Aptos/Calibri/Arial-compatible fallback stacks
• In-presentation and external hyperlinks
• Per-URI slide, zoom, rotation, sidebar, and overview restoration
• External-change notification and reload
• Light, dark, and high-contrast VS Code theme integration
• File-size confirmation and bounded ZIP parsing for untrusted presentations
• Local and virtual/remote filesystem support

Presentation contents are parsed and rendered locally in the VS Code webview. The extension does not make network requests, execute VBA macros, or collect telemetry. Font diagnostics check only family names requested by the current presentation; the extension does not enumerate or copy installed fonts.

Commands

• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Open PowerPoint Presentation
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Open Current Presentation in Viewer
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Go to Slide
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Find in Presentation
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Toggle Navigation Sidebar
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Toggle Slide Overview
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Zoom In
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Zoom Out
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Rotate Clockwise
• PowerPoint Viewer Sidekick: Reload Presentation

Settings

• powerpointSidekick.defaultZoom
• powerpointSidekick.rememberViewState
• powerpointSidekick.fileSizeWarningMB

Format support and limitations

The viewer supports PowerPoint Open XML packages. Legacy binary .ppt files are intentionally not registered. Macro-enabled packages can be viewed, but macros are never executed.

PowerPoint's format is extensive, so some content may be approximated or omitted. Animations do not play: the viewer resolves entrance/exit visibility, paragraph exits, motion, rotation, and scale to a final static stage. Emphasis/color effects, media commands, and complex timing may be approximated or ignored, and slide transitions do not play. Other current renderer limitations include 3D effects and true 3D charts, equations, slide notes, embedded OLE objects, and full EMF/WMF vector rendering. Password-protected presentations are not supported. Editing, presenting, printing, and slide reordering are not implemented; source files are never modified.

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build

Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host. Run npm run test:integration for the VS Code smoke test and npm run package to produce a VSIX.

PowerPoint rendering is provided by @aiden0z/pptx-renderer under the Apache-2.0 license. Its license is included in packaged builds.