Extract every slide's text from a .pptx free, with speaker notes if you want them. No PowerPoint licence, no account, and no upload of your deck.

How it works

The archive's directory is listed, every ppt/slides/slideN.xml member is inflated in turn, and each is scanned for a:p paragraphs containing a:t runs. Presentations use DrawingML rather than the WordprocessingML a .docx uses, so the element names differ and there is no shared string table — each slide carries its own words. Slides are ordered by the number in the filename parsed as a number, because sorting the names as strings puts slide10 directly after slide1.

What to watch out for

Text inside diagrams and charts is missing

SmartArt, chart labels and embedded objects live in their own parts of the archive rather than on the slide, and none of them are read. A deck whose content is mostly diagrams will come back looking far emptier than it is, which is worth knowing before you conclude the file is broken.

Reading order follows the file, not the layout

Lines come out in the order PowerPoint stored the shapes, which is the order they were created rather than where they ended up on the slide. A deck built tidily from layouts reads correctly; one assembled by dragging text boxes around can come out shuffled within a slide.

The first line is treated as the title by convention

In Markdown output the opening paragraph of each slide becomes the heading. PowerPoint does record placeholder roles that would say so properly, but decks built without layouts do not use them, so this is a rule of thumb rather than something the file states.

Limits

Files up to about 100 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

What this is for

Three things, mostly.

Revising from someone else’s deck. A lecture given as forty slides is far faster to review as two pages of text than as forty screens, and the text can be searched, quoted and pasted into notes.

Reusing the words. Writing a summary, an agenda or a handout from a presentation means retyping unless the text comes out, and it comes out here in slide order with the structure roughly intact.

Checking a deck you inherited. Extracting the text of a presentation you did not write is the quickest way to see what is actually claimed in it without clicking through every slide.

Speaker notes, and why they are off by default

Notes live in their own part of the archive — notesSlides alongside slides — and they are frequently where the real content of a talk sits, while the slides carry only headings.

They are skipped unless you ask because most people extracting a deck want what the audience saw. When you do ask for them, there is a wrinkle worth knowing: a notes page in PowerPoint contains a copy of the slide’s own text as well as the speaker’s notes. Left alone that makes every slide appear twice. Lines already seen on the slide are therefore dropped, so what you get is only the notes themselves.

Why diagram text goes missing

This is the limitation that surprises people, so it deserves stating plainly rather than hiding in a caveat.

A slide’s own text lives in the slide’s XML. A SmartArt graphic does not — it is a separate diagram part with its own data model, referenced from the slide. Charts are the same, as are embedded spreadsheets and grouped objects created by some tools.

A deck of bullet points extracts almost completely. A deck of process diagrams and org charts extracts its titles and very little else. If the result looks thin, that is usually why, and the words are still in the file rather than lost — just somewhere this tool does not read.

The old .ppt format

Anything saved before 2007, or deliberately saved as .ppt since, is a compound binary file rather than a ZIP of XML. There is no archive to open and no XML to parse, so the tool says so rather than reporting a damaged file. Opening it in PowerPoint, Keynote or LibreOffice and saving as .pptx is the only route.

Nothing is uploaded

The archive is opened and the slides parsed inside a Web Worker in your browser. Internal strategy decks, client pitches and unpublished course material are what this gets used on, and none of them need to be sent to a server to have their words read out.

Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-02.

Get the text out of a PowerPoint deck