Can ChatGPT read PowerPoint PPTX files?

What survives the upload

Decks are the format where this hurts most, because a good presentation deliberately puts the argument in the visuals and keeps the text sparse. Extract only the text from a well designed deck and you can be left with very little.

Check the speaker notes first

The single most useful thing about analysing decks.

Speaker notes are text, so they come through, and in most real presentations they hold the actual argument: what the chart shows, why it matters, what the recommendation is. The slide says "Q3 Performance" and the notes say what happened and what to do about it.

If your deck has notes, say so:

This deck has speaker notes. Use them as the primary content, and the slide text as headings.

If it does not, and the slides are mostly visual, a text extraction was always going to be thin, and that is worth knowing before you judge the answer.

Getting the visuals looked at

Two options depending on what you need.

Export slides as images and upload those. ChatGPT can work with images directly, so a chart it can see is a chart it can discuss. Capped at 20 MB each with a ceiling of about 100 images per conversation, so choose the slides that carry the answer.

Describe the charts in text. Faster for a handful of figures. Paste the underlying numbers rather than describing the picture, and you will get a better answer than either route alone.

Things decks are genuinely good for

Tightening the writing. Ask it to cut every slide's text to a single line, or to rewrite bullets in a consistent voice.

Finding the structure problem. "Where does the argument in this deck jump, and which slide is doing too much work?" is a text question and it answers it well.

Turning a deck into prose. Decks make poor documents, and converting one into a written summary for people who missed the meeting works well, particularly when the speaker notes are present.

Generating the questions you will be asked. "What would a sceptical audience push back on here?" is useful preparation and needs no visuals.

If the deck is very long

Presentations are usually well under the limits, since text is light. A very long deck, or a set of them concatenated, can pass 2 million tokens and get truncated silently.

The same check applies as for any document. Ask what the final slide is titled. If it cannot say, it did not get there.