PowerPoint mechanics
How PowerPoint files actually work
Guides to the parts of a presentation that only become visible when something goes wrong: the font that vanished on someone else's laptop, the 90 MB file nobody can email, the AI export that turned out to be a stack of pictures. Every claim here is sourced and dated, because most of what is written about this is neither.
9 min read
Why AI decks export as flat images
Three ways a tool can write a .pptx, only one of which you can edit, and the 30 second test that tells them apart.
10 min read
Embedding fonts in PowerPoint
The checkbox, the licence bits that override it, and the three places embedded fonts are ignored anyway.
12 min read
What's inside a .pptx file
Unzip the archive, read the shape tree, and learn the coordinate system PowerPoint actually uses.
About these guides
Do I need Skiaw to use these guides?
No. Every guide is written to be followed with PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides or a text editor and a zip utility, whichever you already have. Skiaw is mentioned where it is relevant to the mechanics being described, and skipping those paragraphs costs you nothing.
How current is this?
Each guide shows the date it was published and the date it was last updated, and every claim about how PowerPoint or a competing product behaves links to a source with the date that URL was last opened. If something has changed since, the source is there so you can check it yourself.
Why is this all about file formats rather than presenting?
Because advice on how to present well is already written thousands of times over and rarely wrong. What is genuinely hard to find is a clear explanation of what a .pptx file contains, why fonts and layouts break when a deck moves between machines, and what an AI tool is actually handing you when it says it exports to PowerPoint. That is the gap these guides fill.
Can I suggest a guide?
Yes. Email contact@skiaw.com with the question you could not find a good answer to. Topics that come up more than once get written first.