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Troubleshooting

If you encounter problems when opening a .pptx-file modified by this library, you might worry about PowerPoint not giving any details about the error. It can be hard to find the cause, but there are some things you can check:

  • Broken relation: There are still unsupported shape types and pptx-automizer will not copy required relations of those. You can inflate .pptx output and check ppt/slides/_rels/slide[#].xml.rels files to find possible missing files.
  • Unsupported media: You can also take a look at the ppt/media-directory of an inflated .pptx-file. If you discover any unusual file formats, remove or replace the files by one of the known types.
  • Broken animation: Pay attention to modified/removed shapes which are part of an animation. In case of doubt, (temporarily) remove all animations from your template. (see #78)
  • Proprietary/Binary contents (e.g. ThinkCell): Walk through all slides, slideMasters and slideLayouts and seek for hidden Objects. Hit ALT+F10 to toggle the sidebar.
  • Chart datasheet won't open If you encounter an error message on opening a chart's datasheet, please make sure that the data table (blue bordered rectangle in worksheet view) of your template starts at cell A:1. If not, open worksheet in Excel mode and edit the table size in the table draft tab.

Bisecting the repair prompt​

If the output opens with a PowerPoint repair prompt and the checks above don't point to a cause:

  1. Retry with cleanup: false and cleanupPlaceholders: false.
  2. Remove exotic elements (animations, embedded videos, ThinkCell remnants) from the template.
  3. Isolate the failing slide by bisecting your addSlide calls — comment out half of them, re-run, and narrow down until the offending slide (or modification) is found.

Another powerful check: run the repo's OOXML schema validator (yarn validate:pptx) on your output — it usually names the exact part and element PowerPoint chokes on.

If none of these could help, please don't hesitate to talk about it.

Testing​

You can run all unit tests using these commands:

yarn test
yarn test-coverage

See Testing and Validation Tools for the full test system — archive invariants, the docs-examples compile gate, schema validation and visual regression.