How to import PowerPoint (.pptx) to Figma Slides using Pitchdeck

Video Transcript

Today I'm going to be showing you a quick tutorial on how to import your presentations from PowerPoint into Figma Slides using the Pitchdeck Figma plugin.

To get started, all we're going to do is go to our Figma app, and then we're going to switch to a brand new Figma design file. We're going to come back to Figma Slides in a moment, and we're going to go to a regular Figma design file over here.

What you want to do is go to the "Resources" icon and search for Pitchcheck. Under the "Plugins" tab, if you find the Pitchcheck item, you can click on that and then run the Figma plugin by either clicking on this run button here or, I'd recommend clicking on this save icon here to save it to your plugins list for easy access later. I've already saved it to my plugins list, so I'm just going to go to my Figma design file canvas, right-click anywhere, go down to "Plugins," then go down to "Saved plugins," and click on the Pitchcheck item. That’s just going to run the Figma plugin we saved a second ago.

If you're new to the Figma plugin, the way that it works is it helps you to create presentations from Figma frames in your Figma file. Today, we're going to be using the import PowerPoint feature to automatically import .pptx files into Figma, which we can then import into our Figma Slides file in a moment. All you need to do is have an existing PowerPoint file. I've got a couple here that I'm going to show you as an example. I've got this basic one that just comes with PowerPoint, and then I've got a more visually interesting one over here. We're going to import both of these from PowerPoint into Figma Slides using the Figma plugin.

If you go back to your Figma file, you can see there's this "Import .pptx" button over here. You can either click on that and browse for your file, or if you've got it on your desktop or computer locally, you can just drag and drop that easily into this little drop zone area here. If you drop it into that area, you can see it's going to automatically import those slides from PowerPoint into our Figma file. It just imported those seven slides, and we can see that's all looking really good. These are all editable layers, so you can see if we zoom in here that these are real text layers that we can modify. You can see here that the elements are all individual and can be moved around as you'd expect.

Now that we've got the PowerPoint file imported into Figma, the only step we need to do now is select all those frames. I'm just going to do Command A or Control A if you're on Windows. Once you've selected all of your frames that we just imported from PowerPoint, go ahead and right-click those and then click on the copy button. Just click copy, and then we're going to switch back into the Figma Slides file. I've got a new Figma Slides file open over here, and we're going to click on the start from scratch button. We're not going to load any templates; we're just going to start from scratch and click on that.

Then, you just want to make sure that you're in the list view. There's a list view and a grid view. It should be in list view like this by default, but if it's not, just make sure that's selected. Underneath the first frame down here, we're going to click in the sidebar, right-click, and then click on paste. We're going to click paste, and you can see that's automatically imported our frames that we just imported from PowerPoint and then copied from Figma into the Figma Slides UI. You can see we've got all of the Figma Slides now loading up those frames. Again, these are all editable, so you can edit this content in Figma Slides. All of that is real text and real images. You can move these around; you can replace them. If you want to swap out the images, you can do that over here as you'd expect.

That’s all looking really good. It just means that we can now play around with these PowerPoint slides in the Figma Slides interface without having to worry about all of the annoyances that come with PowerPoint. You get all the benefits of using Figma Slides, all of the nice UI over here that we can play around with and update our slides and content with. Then, you can also present this with Figma Slides or do any other kind of presentation method that you want to use with the Figma Slides UI.

Now that we've got that first one imported, I'll show you one more example just to iterate the point home. You can again use this "Import .pptx" button down here and either click on that or just drag and drop your .pptx file down into that little drop zone area and let go. Once you do that, it's going to open up that PowerPoint file, import those PowerPoint slides into Figma, and let you automatically copy and paste those into a new Figma Slides file. We'll do that in a moment. Again, you can see here it just finished importing all of those new slides from the other PowerPoint file that we just imported into our Figma file.

You can see that these are all editable; we can modify these. This is all rich text and interactive with all of the individual elements. I'm just going to copy all of these, so just select all and then right-click copy. I'm going to create a brand new Figma Slides file. I'm just going to go to my Figma icon, go to file, then click on new slide deck. That's going to open up a brand new Figma Slides file. One more time, I'm just going to click on the start from scratch button to insert a blank slide. Again, just make sure that the list view is selected. Go down into the list on the sidebar here, right-click that, and click on paste. That's going to automatically paste in those slides that we just imported from PowerPoint into Figma, and these are now available in the Figma Slides file instantly.

Again, you can see that these are all editable. We can update this copy, we can move images around, we can replace images if we want to using the image replacement feature over here, and of course, you can rearrange slides as you'd expect. You can view those in the grid view if you want to see them all at one go. You're basically just taking an existing PowerPoint file, importing those slides from PowerPoint into Figma Slides over here, and then it's up to you how you use the Figma Slides UI to improve or keep working on that presentation.

Yeah, that's basically it. I just wanted to show you a really quick Figma tutorial on how to automatically import files from PowerPoint into Figma Slides. If you're using Figma Slides and enjoy the interface but don't like the idea of manually recreating your existing presentations from PowerPoint, which is sadly just a reality that PowerPoint is still a very popular presentation tool that a lot of companies need. If you're forced to work on presentations in PowerPoint, that can then be imported into Figma Slides using the Pitchcheck Figma plugin's PowerPoint import feature. This is going to be a really handy way of automating that process.

You can see it's still in BETA, so there might be some hiccups here and there with layer positioning and small things like that, but those will improve over time. Hopefully, the amount of time it saves already is going to be really big compared to manually importing those PowerPoint files into Figma Slides. We'll leave it there for today. Thank you, as always, for watching, and we'll be back with more Figma tutorials like this one very soon.