# Figma to PowerPoint

Experiment by Seemant Shekhar (New). https://www.seemant.design/lab/figma-to-powerpoint

We design decks in Figma, but sales and marketing work in PowerPoint. I built a Figma plugin that exports slide frames as an editable .pptx: text stays text, shapes stay shapes, and cards and icons move as groups.

- **Built for**: The design team at Heaps
- **Runs in**: Figma desktop, no network access
- **Stack**: TypeScript, PptxGenJS, JSZip

- Video: A 53-second walkthrough on a placeholder deck: pick the order, choose editable or pictures, export, and see what each slide became.

- Image: Exported test slide with buttons, chevrons, a star, a donut, a gradient circle, an arrow and a cropped screenshot. One exported slide up close. Shapes, gradients, icons and arrows are native PowerPoint objects; only the screenshot is a picture.
## Why

Our previous export tool left links in the files that IT couldn’t account for, and our decks carry client and company data. The replacement had three rules: a genuinely editable PowerPoint, nothing leaves the designer’s computer, and IT can verify the output instead of trusting it.

## Trust you can check

The plugin asks Figma for no network access at all, so Figma itself blocks any request; every library is bundled in. A small audit script lets IT scan any exported deck for links, macros or embedded objects, and the build fails if a dependency ever carries an AGPL licence.

## Editable was the point

The first version exported each slide as a picture. It looked right and was useless to the people who needed it, so I rebuilt it around native objects: text with its fonts and mixed formatting, rectangles and freeform vectors, gradients, arrowheads, and Figma frames as named PowerPoint groups.

When something can’t be native, like a blur or a mask, it becomes a picture and the plugin says why after export. Designers can also force a layer to a picture with [img] or leave it out with [skip].

## Clipping took two attempts

PowerPoint can’t clip a group the way a Figma frame clips its content. My first rule turned any overflowing frame into a picture, which locked whole stat cards. “Never clip text” fixed that but let hidden rows of a UI mockup spill below their screen. The rule now works from what is actually painted: hidden layers are left out, visible ones stay editable, and only what straddles the edge becomes a picture cropped to exactly what Figma shows.

## Two tools that disagree

Figma and PowerPoint differ on the basics: rotation direction and pivot, where a stroke sits on an edge, how far a gradient spans, how fonts are named and measured. Each one needed a translation rule, plus small patches where the export library writes files PowerPoint wants to “repair”.