Importing a PowerPoint Deck Without Losing the Speaker Notes
Piskes Slides can read and write PPTX files. Whether speaker notes specifically survive that round trip in every case is a narrower claim we're not going to overstate here.
Speaker notes are one of the most common casualties of deck-import tools, and it's a specific, checkable thing to ask about rather than a vague "does it support PowerPoint" question — plenty of tools support opening a .pptx file while quietly dropping the notes typed underneath each slide, because notes live in a different part of the file format than the visible slide content and it's easy for an import path to only handle the part people notice first.
What's real here
Piskes Slides has PPTX read and write support — the code exists (frontend/apps/drive/src/lib/slides/pptx-reader.ts and pptx.ts), and it's a real, shipped part of importing and exporting decks, not a roadmap item. You can bring an existing PowerPoint deck into Piskes Slides and take a deck back out as a .pptx file.
What we're not going to claim without checking it directly
Whether speaker notes specifically survive that round trip — import in, export back out, notes intact both ways — is a narrower question than "does PPTX import exist," and it's the kind of claim that's easy to get wrong by assumption. It's worth naming honestly here: a similar-sounding question about a different feature (whether footnotes survive a Word document import) turned out to have a stale, incorrect code comment sitting next to it claiming footnotes were dropped, when a direct test showed they weren't. That's a useful lesson in the other direction too — a comment or assumption near this code could just as easily be wrong the other way, overstating what survives rather than understating it. The honest position, without a fresh, direct check of the reader's actual field-by-field behavior specifically for speaker notes, is that PPTX import and export are real and shipped, and the speaker-notes-specific claim isn't one we're going to assert here as fully verified.
What to do if speaker notes matter to your workflow
If you're bringing a deck into Piskes Slides specifically because you need your speaker notes to come with it, the practical move is the same one this piece is modeling: import a real deck with notes in it, and check directly whether they show up on the Piskes Slides side, rather than assuming either way. That's a two-minute check against your own file, and it's a more reliable answer for your specific deck than a general claim either direction would be.
This is a narrower, more cautious piece than "PowerPoint import just works" — and that's deliberate. A specific, checkable claim that turns out to be wrong costs more trust than a general one that's honestly scoped, and speaker notes are exactly specific and checkable enough that it's worth being careful here rather than confident.