Extract speaker notes from PowerPoint to text

This page is part of my digital garden. It is more like a notebook entry than a polished blog post. It's a space where I document learnings primarily for my own reference, yet share them in case they benefit others. Unlike my blog posts, these pages are works-in-progress and updated over time. Like tending to a real garden, I periodically refine its content. I welcome suggestions for improvements at dries@buytaert.net.

When working on presentations, I like to extract my speaker notes to review the flow and turn them into blog posts. I'm doing this right now for my DrupalCon Vienna talk.

I used to do this manually, but with presentations often having 100+ slides, it gets tedious and isn't very repeatable. So I ended up automating this with a Python script.

Since I use Apple Keynote or Google Slides rather than Microsoft PowerPoint, I first export my presentations to PowerPoint format, then run my Python script.

If you've ever needed to pull speaker notes from a presentation for review, editing or blogging, here is my script and how to use it.

Speaker notes extractor script

Save this code as powerpoint-to-text.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Extract speaker notes from PowerPoint presentations to text files."""

import sys
from pathlib import Path
from pptx import Presentation

def extract_speaker_notes(pptx_path: Path) -> tuple[str, int]:
  """Extract speaker notes from a PowerPoint file.
  
  Args:
    pptx_path: Path to the PowerPoint file
    
  Returns:
    Tuple of (extracted notes text, number of slides with notes)
  """
  prs = Presentation(pptx_path)
  notes_text = []
  notes_count = 0
  
  for i, slide in enumerate(prs.slides, 1):
    if slide.notes_slide and slide.notes_slide.notes_text_frame:
      notes = slide.notes_slide.notes_text_frame.text.strip()
      if notes:
        notes_text.append(f"=== Slide {i} ===\n{notes}\n")
        notes_count += 1
        
  return "\n".join(notes_text), notes_count

def main():
  if len(sys.argv) != 2:
    print("Usage: python powerpoint-to-text.py presentation.pptx")
    sys.exit(1)
  
  input_path = Path(sys.argv[1])
  
  if not input_path.exists():
    print(f"Error: File '{input_path}' not found")
    sys.exit(1)
    
  if not input_path.suffix.lower() == '.pptx':
    print(f"Warning: '{input_path}' may not be a PowerPoint file")
  
  # Extract notes
  try:
    notes_text, notes_count = extract_speaker_notes(input_path)
  except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error reading presentation: {e}")
    sys.exit(1)
  
  # Write output
  output_path = input_path.with_suffix('.txt')
  output_path.write_text(notes_text, encoding='utf-8')
  
  print(f"Extracted {notes_count} slides with notes to {output_path}")

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

The script uses the python-pptx library to read PowerPoint files. This library understands the internal structure of .pptx files (which are zip archives containing XML). It provides a clean Python interface to access slides and their speaker notes. The script loops through each slide, checks if it has notes, and writes them to a text file.

Usage

I like to use uv to run Python code. uv is a fast, modern Python package manager that handles dependencies automatically:

$ uv run --with python-pptx powerpoint-to-text.py your-presentation.pptx

This saves a .txt file with your notes in the same directory as the input file, not the current directory or desktop.

The text file contains:

=== Slide 1 ===
Speaker notes from slide 1 ...

=== Slide 3 ===
Speaker notes from slide 3 ...

Only slides with speaker notes are included.