Generating placeholder slides for your presentation

Yolanda Zhou ([yolandazzz13])

2025-07-23

Overview

This vignette shows how to add placeholder slides, including title slides and section headers, to a PowerPoint presentation using autoslider.core.

The main function for this is append_all_slides, which takes in a structured page_list as input to define the slides you want to add. This approach is ideal for quickly building a standardized presentation from scratch.

Generating a Deck with append_all_slides

The append_all_slides function automates adding multiple slides by reading a page_list you provide. Each item in this list defines a single slide’s properties.

Each slide definition in the page_list must be a list containing:

type: The kind of slide to add (“title” or “section”).

to_page: The page number where the slide should be inserted.

Content parameters:

Fortype = "title", you need to provide a study_id.

For type = "section", you need to provide a section_title.

Example: Generating placeholder slides

Here’s a complete example. We’ll start with an empty presentation, define a page_list for our slides, and then call append_all_slides to generate the final deck and save it to a file.

library(officer)
library(tools)

# 1. Define a initial presentation file
input <- "My_Presentation.pptx"
read_pptx() %>% print(target = input)

expected_output_file <- file.path(
  dirname(input),
  paste0(file_path_sans_ext(basename(input)), "_final.pptx")
)

# 2. Define the presentation structure with a page_list
my_page_list <- list(
  list(type = "title", to_page = 1, study_id = "Project No.1"),
  list(type = "section", to_page = 2, section_title = "Introduction"),
  list(type = "section", to_page = 3, section_title = "Methodology")
)

# 3. Call append_all_slides to generate the deck
# Set save_file = TRUE to write the result to a new file.
# If you have an existing pptx object to modify on, pass it into `doc_original`.
doc_result <- append_all_slides(
  doc_o = temp_pptx,
  page_list = my_page_list,
  doc_original = NULL,
  save_file = TRUE
)

# 4. Verify the output
cat(paste("Number of slides created:", length(doc_result), "\n"))
cat(paste("Output file exists:", file.exists(expected_output_file)))

This script produces a new PowerPoint file named My_Presentation_final.pptx, containing the three slides defined in my_page_list.

Notes

• to_page parameter: The function validates that it does not exceed the maximum possible slide position (number of slides + 1). After a slide is inserted at a specific page, all subsequent page numbers shift. Plan your page_list sequence accordingly.

• The functions are designed to work with standard officer layouts. They will fail if PowerPoint does not support the specified layouts (“Title and Content”, “Section Header”) and master theme (“Office Theme”).