Reading a deck instead of retyping it

The request always arrives the same way. Someone sends a .pptx and asks whether the deck can be made to look better.

From there a designer has two routes and both are bad.

Export the slides as images, drop them into Figma, and draw on top of dead pictures. Every piece of text has to be retyped to change it, and the file you hand back has no relationship to the file they will keep editing.

Or rebuild it by hand. Forty slides, each one a small act of transcription, and several hours spent before a single design decision has been made.

The third option was always there

A .pptx is a zip archive full of XML. The text is text. A shape is a shape with coordinates. The layout is described, not drawn.

None of that information is missing. It just does not survive the export step, because exporting to an image is throwing away structure on purpose.

So the tool does not convert the deck into a picture of a deck. It reads the structure and rebuilds it as frames: text stays text, shapes stay shapes, and things sit where the author put them. What lands in Figma is editable, which means the first hour goes into design instead of typing.

Fidelity is not the goal

This is the part I got wrong at first. I spent time chasing exact reproduction: gradient fills, table borders, the precise kerning of a title.

Nobody wants an exact copy. If the deck were fine, they would not be asking. The value is not "this looks identical", it is "everything is here, in the right place, and I can change it". A slightly wrong shadow on a shape you are about to delete costs nothing. A heading that arrived as an image costs the whole point.

Once I aimed at editable instead of identical, the scope halved and the tool got better.

Two formats, one path

PowerPoint files and Google Slides exports both come through the same import, because in practice a team has some of each and nobody wants to know which one they are holding.

That is not a technical achievement. It is the difference between a tool somebody uses and a tool somebody has to think about before using.