OfficeJS Extracting all text from every slide of a PowerPoint document

Question

We want to extract all text of an opened PowerPoint document from an add-in.

In Word, we do the following:

Word.run( context => {
  var paragraphs = context.document.body.paragraphs;
  context.load(paragraphs, 'text');
  return context.sync().then( () => {
    var items = paragraphs.items.;
    // Do something with items
  }
});

We're only interested in the text of the PowerPoint document.

We haven't found much documentation on how to use the API for PowerPoint specifically (this is all we found). This sample project comes close to what we want in that it extracts data from the document but we were hoping to do it without loading the compressed file and parsing the text from the file chunks.

How might we best approach this?

Answer 1

I'm afraid this isn't possible. The Office.js reference documentation can filter out everything except the PowerPoint APIs but the functionality is somewhat primitive. In this case, there isn't an API that allows you iterate through the objects in the document like you can in Word or Excel.

As you found in that sample, you can use the Document.getFileAsync method to retrieve the raw OOXML. Parsing OOXML isn't quite as painful as it seems at first (it's just XML). The large challenge is once you have the OOXML, there isn't a way to push changes you make to it back into PowerPoint. It is effectively a read-only operation.

I would strongly suggest visiting the Office Dev UserVoice site and adding your suggestions. The UserVoice is regularly reviewed by the product teams and is the best method of ensuring PowerPoint is made aware of the limitations you're running into with the API.