12 Mar 2025 Generating PowerPoint Presentations Automatically with PptxGenJS

PowerPoint is one of Microsoft’s best-known applications as well as one of the most widely used tools in the world for creating slide presentations. It offers a variety of design options to help you create your content and present it to your audience, but it takes time to make a polished presentation that you’re happy with. You need to position each PowerPoint object (like a shape, text, or table), then set all the associated properties like size, colour, and so on, and then input all the important data, slide by slide.

It’s fairly common to reuse the same presentations as templates for recurring tasks, such as reporting sales or monthly objectives. In these cases, the updated information needs to be entered, maintaining the design but replacing the old data with the new. Wouldn’t it be handy to have a tool that saves you time by automating the process?

One of the leading tools for automatically creating PowerPoint presentations is PptxGenJS, and today we’ll explore how it can help us to generate a PowerPoint file.

What is PptxGenJS?

PptxGenJS is a JavaScript library for generating PowerPoint presentations in an easy yet impressive way. It supports all the main PowerPoint objects, including master slides, charts, tables, and shapes, letting you create complete presentations automatically.

One of its key features is Slide Master, which lets you define consistent slide styles and static elements as reusable templates, guaranteeing visual consistency across your presentations whilst simplifying the design process.

Getting started is easy: just import the library into your JavaScript project and start defining what you want to generate. If you need some pointers, there’s a comprehensive guide in the official documentation to get you up and running quickly.

How Does PptxGenJS Work?

PptxGenJS works by managing all presentation objects, positioning them using coordinates and defining their properties, just as you would when creating a PowerPoint presentation manually. Some of the most used objects in this library are charts, images, media, tables, shapes, and texts; all the available properties and actions for each element can be found in the official documentation.

When working with a text box object, for example, you can define its position using coordinates and customise its properties, like dimensions (h for height, w for width), italic styling, colouring, etc.

Note: Dimensions are measured depending on the slide and are measured in inches by default. Colours are defined with RGB values.

slide.addText('Example text', {
    x: 0.5,
    y: 0.5,
    h: 1,
    w: 2,
    color: '0088CC',
    italic: true,
  });

Code snippet 1: Sample code for adding a simple text box to a slide with some basic formatting

This code will produce the following result on a PowerPoint slide:

Figure 1: Text box example result in PowerPoint slide

What Can We Achieve with PptxGenJS?

Once we’ve configured the slides using the library code, we can generate impressive presentations automatically. While the initial setup requires some effort, the results are well worth it:

Figure 2: Presentation slide generation example

In this example we’ve placed a title and subtitle in the top left, several text boxes on the left, a table in the top right, a chart on the right, legend shapes in the bottom right, and additional information in the footer.

But a more important and typical use case is automating the creation of recurring reports. Remember that colleague of yours who prepares those presentations on company activity for the executive team? Every week they spend valuable time manually updating the same slides, copying data from a web source or form and pasting it into PowerPoint – a very repetitive task.

Well, imagine a light application with predefined slide templates: a corporate-themed opening slide with a title, data slides with a different background, and perhaps a footer for additional details. Connected to a data source, the app could pull in the latest figures and generate a fully updated presentation instantly, ready for download in a couple of seconds.

This is just an example, but there are loads of similar situations that can be solved easily and effortlessly. Automating these tasks can save you and your employees countless hours. The power of automation is undeniable: who wouldn’t want to generate polished presentations in seconds rather than in hours?

Our Solution for PowerPoint Automation

Here at ClearPeaks we’ve already developed a solution for automating PowerPoint generation. The backend is built around a REST API which receives the required fields from the data source, generates the presentation, then streams it directly to your web browser, ready for download.

Requirements

First, we need to understand the customer’s specific design requirements for their slides so we can integrate them into our solution. This involves gathering details on their preferences and how they want the presentation to look.

Once we have this information, we can proceed with the development and integration phase.

Receive Data

Once all the slide template properties have been set according to the customer’s requirements, they can start calling our API, providing the required dynamic information in a specified data structure. The rest is handled on our end.

Presentation Response

Our backend will process the provided data and generate the PowerPoint presentation, maintaining all the previously defined visual specifications while placing the dynamic data in the correct place.

Let’s take a look at our application in action: imagine the customer has requested a presentation where the first slide features a corporate pattern, a title, and the current date, with the second slide showing a table outlining the company’s main priorities, along with a visual legend in the footer.

Below you can see what a web browser request in JSON format would look like:

{
    "templateId": "example_weekly_updates",
    "data": {
        "title": "Weekly Priorities and Focus Areas",
        "headers": [
            "STATUS",
            "TOPIC",
            "DESCRIPTION",
            "FOCAL POINT",
            "DEADLINE"
        ],
        "rows": [
            [
                "Completed",
                "Priorities Revamp",
                "Access backend weekly update \n
                 Add more fields in the backend \n
                 Send weekly report
                ",
                "Phillip B.",
                "30th Nov"
            ],
            [
                "To-Watch",
                "Priorities Revamp (Backend user requirement)",
                "Confirm having the traffic light in the frontend. \n
                 Confirm the name of the priorities title
                ",
                "Olivia D.",
                "13th Nov"
            ],
            [
                "Overdue",
                "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit",
                "Mauris volutpat semper ullamcorper \n
                 Mauris id turpis nibh
                ",
                "Walter B.",
                "25th Oct"
            ],
            [
                "On-Track",
                "Phasellus varius accumsan dui, eu mattis sem sodales in",
                "Ut aliquet, ligula sed fringilla auctor \n
                 Maecenas convallis purus vitae bibendum accumsan
                ",
                "Peter B.",
                "3rd Dec"
            ]
        ]
    }
}

Code snippet 2: Example request in JSON format providing some data for a presentation generation

The code would automatically generate this presentation:

Figure 3.1: Automatically generated PowerPoint presentation title slide

Figure 3.2: Automatically generated PowerPoint presentation data slide

Pros & Cons

Obviously, as with all technologies, there are some pros and cons to bear in mind:

Pros

• PowerPoint presentations are automatically generated in seconds.
• Real-time data can be integrated into your presentations.
• Significant time saving when dealing with repetitive tasks.
• Human errors are reduced.
• Customisation options are available to meet specific demands.
• Data can be perfectly embedded into company-branded presentations.
• Maximum reusability when you need multiple presentations with the same templates.

Cons

• The initial configuration of templates and visual elements needs some development skills.
• Although key features are included, not all PowerPoint functionalities are available in this library.

Conclusions

PptxGenJS is both a reliable and powerful tool for generating PowerPoint presentations, and there is a high potential for the automation of tasks that require presentations to be shown. With the right development and preparation, you can create professional, high-impact presentations in seconds.

What’s more, if you already have a system where your data is stored, just add a call to our PptxGenJS-managed backend, and presentation generation is effortless and instantaneous.

Worried about the development workload? No problem! Here at ClearPeaks we have the expertise and a dedicated development team to build a solution that fits your needs perfectly. Simply reach out and let us know what you need.