What arrives, and where.
A PowerPoint slide is a list of shapes, each drawn at a coordinate: words in a box, a box, a picture, a table. A slide here is the same thing, so the translation is the one the design import makes — every shape arrives where it was drawn, at its size, in its color, on the deck’s tokens. It is deliberately not a guess at a layout with your text poured into its slots.
Three things a PowerPoint file has that a design export does not, and where each lands. A placeholder that says nothing about its own size or face takes it from the layout, the master or the master’s text styles, so a plain deck arrives set rather than in one size. Slide-number, footer and date placeholders become the deck’s running footer, which has a switch for each; a deck that drew its own foot by hand turns the chrome off instead. And the pictures never travel with the post — see the next section.
Where each part of a .pptx lands. Everything in the middle column stays editable.
Heavy decks get in.
A .pptx is a zip in which the slides are a couple of megabytes of text and everything else is pictures and clips. A long proposal with a dozen videos in it can run to hundreds of megabytes, of which the deck is a few. So the file is opened in your browser first: the media comes out and stays on your side, and the slides travel on their own. Once the deck exists, the pictures and clips are put back through your library’s own uploader, like any other picture.
The import’s own log for a PowerPoint deck. The media stays in the browser until the deck exists.
What does not translate, and what happens to it.
Anything the browser cannot draw — SmartArt, an embedded object, a picture in a format a browser cannot show — arrives as a box at its exact size and is flagged with what to do, never dropped. You see every one of them in the report, per slide, before the deck exists, and again on the slide once it does.
Builds and transitions are the exception that is dropped rather than flagged. PowerPoint’s animation model is not ours, and a bad translation of a build is worse than none. The editor has its own motion, asked for by name once the deck is in.
What to look at afterwards.
A hand-drawn slide is free geometry; a deck here is a grid. Blocks that landed off a column or in the margin are flagged on the slide, and Snap to grid puts them on it in one move. A block that reaches the edge of the slide is taken to be bleeding on purpose and left alone. If the deck used a face that isn’t one of the deck faces, the style names the one it picked, so you can see what changed before anyone else does.
The same well takes a Claude Design and a design made in ChatGPT.