PPTX Toolkit: Conversation with Peter Claus Lamprecht

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  Peter Claus Lamprecht is a presentation consultant based in Hamburg, Germany, with more than 37 years of experience. He helps self-employed professionals, sales and marketing teams, executives and consultants develop presentations that persuade and deliver results—from storyline to slide design to delivery. His specialty is PowerPoint slide masters, that work flawlessly on a technical level, implement the given design precisely and thus save time when working in PowerPoint. With the PPTX Toolkit, he is currently building a tool for direct access to the XML structure of PowerPoint files.

In this conversation, Peter talks about PPTX Toolkit.

Geetesh: Peter, your new PPTX Toolkit gives users direct control over things PowerPoint’s interface deliberately hides, such as placeholder types, idx, inheritance, and guides. Can you tell us more about what motivated you to create this product?

Peter: I have been building Slide Masters for years. Some projects are complex—for example, those from advertising agencies that send me templates designed in Adobe InDesign, or from consulting firms with high demands on the flexibility and functionality of their layouts.

PPTX Toolkit – Importing guides from another file

Over time, I kept running into the same limit: as soon as you go beyond simple formatting—changing a placeholder type after the fact, tracing the inheritance chain between master and layout, checking and editing the actual idx order—the only option left is editing the XML code directly. That takes a lot of time and is error prone. PPTX Toolkit grew out of this need of my own: a tool that makes these hidden XML structures visible and directly editable, without having to search through the code manually every time.

Geetesh: For anyone who has built templates and Slide Masters in PowerPoint, it’s easy to encounter roadblocks: placeholders you can’t reclassify and idx order you can’t see without diving into raw XML. Among these, what’s the single capability that will save them the most time once they start using PPTX Toolkit? Also, can you explain the term idx order for the benefit of users who don’t know about this challenge?

Peter: The biggest time saver is changing a placeholder type after the fact. If you want to turn a generic content placeholder into a picture placeholder, for example, PowerPoint normally forces you to delete it and create it from scratch—a procedure with many mouse clicks that quickly becomes tedious in larger templates. PPTX Toolkit changes the placeholder type directly via a dropdown menu.

idx order: Every placeholder in a layout has a unique idx number. The title placeholder always carries idx 0, for example, and the first content placeholder idx 1. This becomes relevant as soon as a Slide Master contains several layouts with several content or picture placeholders: the idx order determines which content ends up in which placeholder when the slide layout is switched.

Let us explore with some screenshots. This layout contains three picture placeholders with the idx order 1, 2, and 3.

PPTX Toolkit idx Example 1

A second layout contains four picture placeholders, but here the order is 1, 3, 2, 4 — placeholders 2 and 3 are swapped.

PPTX Toolkit idx Example 2

If a slide with three images arranged side by side switches from the first to the second layout, images 2 and 3 automatically swap positions.

PPTX Toolkit idx Examples 3 and 4

With simple layouts you can still fix this manually by swapping the positions of the two placeholders in the second layout in the master. With more complex layouts, you simply edit the idx numbers directly in the PPTX Toolkit.

By the way, PowerPoint does not display idx values anywhere—not even via VBA. The only access is through the XML.

Geetesh: How can one get access to PPTX Toolkit? Also, is a trial version available?

Peter: PPTX Toolkit is currently in active development. It is programmed in Python with the help of Claude Code and runs on Windows. I grant access on request to up to ten test users. There is no official trial version or fixed price yet. The launch is planned for late summer/autumn 2026.

Current features include:

• Editing placeholder attributes (type, idx, size, position, resetting individual properties to master inheritance)
• Convenient adding and editing of custom colors
• Importing guides from another file
• User interface in English and German

Roadmap for more features may include:

• Removing all userDrawn flags
• Editing tables and charts at XML level

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.