PPTX Live Viewer

Open PowerPoint presentations in a VS Code editor tab. The slides are drawn inside VS Code itself — no PowerPoint, no LibreOffice, no online service — and the tab follows the file: when a script or an AI agent writes the presentation again, the new version appears where you were looking.

Features

• Opens a .pptx like any other file. Click it in the Explorer. .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .potx and .potm work the same way.
• Live reload. When the file changes on disk the viewer reads it again and keeps the slide, the zoom, the scroll position and the search. A file caught half-written is tried again; if it stays unreadable, the last good version stays on screen with a notice.
• Thumbnails and speaker notes, each in a panel that can be turned off. Hidden slides are marked.
• Find in all slides, with match case, whole word and regular expressions. Matches are highlighted on the slides.
• Zoom from 10% to 400%, to the whole slide or to the editor width, with the toolbar, the keyboard, or Ctrl/Cmd + wheel and trackpad pinch.
• Large presentations. Only the slides near the view are drawn, so a deck with hundreds of slides opens quickly.
• Links. Web and mail links open in the browser after you confirm the address; links to other slides jump there.
• Nothing leaves your machine. See Privacy and security.
• English and Japanese interface, following the display language of VS Code.

Usage

Open a presentation from the Explorer, or with File: Open File.... To use another editor for the same file, run View: Reopen Editor With....

The toolbar above the slides has the slide number (type a number and press Enter to go there), the zoom controls, the search, and the switches for the thumbnails and the notes. Reload and Open in Default App are in the title bar of the editor.

Keyboard and mouse

While a whole slide fits in the view, the arrow keys, Page Down / Page Up and Space move from slide to slide. Once you zoom in further they scroll instead, like in a PDF viewer.

Commands

All commands are in the Command Palette under PPTX Live Viewer while a presentation is the active editor.

The extension binds no keys of its own outside the viewer. To give a command a key, add it to keybindings.json:

{
  "key": "ctrl+alt+r",
  "command": "pptxLiveViewer.reload",
  "when": "activeCustomEditorId == 'pptxLiveViewer.viewer'"
}

Settings

The zoom, the current slide and the panels of an open tab are remembered for as long as the tab stays open.

What to expect

The slides are drawn as HTML and SVG by pptx-renderer. The result is close to PowerPoint for the usual content — text, shapes, pictures, tables, charts, themes and layouts — but it is a different renderer, and it is a viewer:

• Presentations cannot be edited.
• Animations and transitions are not played, and there is no slide show mode.
• Charts are drawn onto a canvas. Details can differ from PowerPoint, and a chart looks soft at high zoom.
• Text uses the fonts installed on your machine. A font that is missing is replaced by another one, as PowerPoint does.
• The search covers the text on the slides. It does not cover speaker notes, nor the numbers that numbered lists and slide number fields produce.
• Password-protected presentations and the old .ppt format cannot be opened.

When part of a slide cannot be drawn, a warning with the number of such parts appears in the toolbar. Click it to open the PPTX Live Viewer output channel, where the details are listed.

Privacy and security

A presentation is a file from somewhere else, and the viewer treats it that way.

• The file is read and drawn locally. The extension makes no network requests and collects no telemetry.
• The viewer runs in a sandboxed webview with a strict Content Security Policy (default-src 'none'). Pictures and media that a presentation refers to on the web are not fetched.
• A link is opened only when you click it, only if it is an http, https or mailto link, and only after you confirm the address it really points to.
• The extension works in Restricted Mode: it runs no code from the workspace.

Development

npm install --ignore-scripts
npm run build      # bundles the extension and the viewer into dist/
npm run check      # type check and unit tests
npm run sample     # writes dev/samples/sample.pptx
npm run dev        # the viewer in a browser tab: http://127.0.0.1:5177/dev/
npm run package    # builds the .vsix

Press F5 in VS Code to try the extension in an Extension Development Host. The development page runs the same viewer in a plain browser tab with its developer tools; run npm run sample again while it is open to see a reload.

License

MIT. The packaged extension includes pptx-renderer (Apache-2.0), Apache ECharts (Apache-2.0), JSZip (MIT) and the packages they depend on; their notices are in dist/ThirdPartyNotices.txt inside the package.

PowerPoint is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies. This extension is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.