KitchenSink4PPT

Everything plus the kitchen sink for Microsoft PowerPoint: an MCP server for .pptx files, engineered not to corrupt. Slides, text, tables, charts, notes, export, and the one thing no other server in the ecosystem does: arbitrary vector graphics as native, editable PowerPoint shapes.

The headline: real graphics, not pictures of graphics

Feed svg_to_shapes any SVG and it compiles into a grouped tree of NATIVE PowerPoint shapes: custom geometry, gradients, strokes, text, nested groups. No rasterizing, no external APIs, no PowerPoint install needed to build. Every shape keeps its own id, so afterward you edit the diagram semantically: recolor node 7, resize the box, rewrite its label.

Connectors are GLUED. Move the node and the arrows follow, exactly as if a person had drawn the diagram by hand in PowerPoint. The human you hand the deck to can nudge any piece in seconds, with no regeneration round trip.

insert_shape (presets and freeform geometry), insert_connector (straight, elbow, curved, arrowheads), group_shapes, align_shapes, distribute_shapes, and set_z_order cover from-scratch diagram building; export_slide_image renders a PNG so the agent can look at what it made and fix it.

Install

pip install kitchensink4ppt

MCP config (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or any MCP client):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "powerpoint": {
      "command": "ppt-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Requires Python 3.12+. Everything file-based runs on any OS; PDF and image export prefer PowerPoint via COM on Windows and fall back to LibreOffice headless where available. Nothing ever needs a network connection.

Tiered loading: start light, grow mid-session

The server starts in lite mode: 24 tools, roughly 4.7k tokens of tool context, covering reading, slide CRUD, text, hyperlinks, batch editing, backups, and diagnostics. The other 114 tools are registered but disabled until asked for:

enable_tools(packs=["graphics"])

The tool list grows in place (the server emits tools/list_changed and the client re-fetches), and the result reports the approximate token cost added so the tradeoff is visible. disable_tools shrinks the surface again, and get_workflows ships recipes that name the right pack for each job.

Environment pins for hosts and power users:

The server checks PyPI, the package index it was installed from, at most once every 14 days to see whether a newer version exists; the check sends nothing but a standard HTTP request for that package's public JSON, and setting KS4P_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 turns it off entirely. It runs on a background thread at startup, so it never delays a call, and it fails silently: a timeout or an offline machine leaves no error anywhere. When a newer release exists, diagnose adds one line saying so. That is the only place it ever appears, and the server never downloads or installs anything on its own.

The last two are the checkboxes the .mcpb bundle shows in Claude Desktop: "Load every tool at startup" and "Lock the tool set at startup". Both take true or false, treat an empty value as off, and refuse to start on anything else rather than guessing. The server writes one line to stderr at startup naming what decided the surface.

Tip: in Claude Desktop's Tool permissions, set the Read-only tools group to Always Allow: those tools cannot change anything, and it stops most permission prompts.

Pack inventory (138 tools total)

Full surface: about 27.4k tokens if you pin KS4P_MODE=full (numbers from scripts/measure_surface.py, not hand-math).

v1.1 consolidated nine packs into six. The v1.0 names transitions-animations, review, sweeps, and com-live still resolve to their new homes in enable_tools, disable_tools, and KS4P_MODE, so nothing that worked before stops working.

Structural table operations on the file itself (merging, inserting and deleting rows AND columns, per-edge borders) exist in no other PowerPoint MCP server; they were previously COM-or-nothing.

Safety story

The same discipline as KitchenSink4Word, applied from day one:

• Atomic validated saves. Every mutation rebuilds the package in memory, validates the payload, then atomically replaces the file. A failed operation leaves the original byte-identical; the file is never absent from its own path, even for an instant.
• Two-slot backups. Before each mutation the current content rotates into prev.pptx and anchor.pptx under a hidden .ks4p-backups/ folder. manage_backups lists, restores (undoably), and purges; create_snapshot makes DTG-stamped permanent keepers.
• Byte-identical passthrough. Parts the tool did not touch are written back byte-for-byte, so themes, media, and animations survive edits to other slides untouched.
• Conservative refusals. Ambiguous targets refuse with a candidate list (no first-match guessing), merged-cell surgery that would split a span refuses, stale batch anchors refuse the whole batch before anything mutates. Refusals are structured ({ok: false, error: {code, message, hint}}) and tell you the exact next call to make.
• Sandboxing, opt-in. Set KS4P_ALLOWED_ROOTS and every path in and out is checked.
• Locks. Mutations of one file are serialized in-process and across processes; files open in PowerPoint are refused rather than corrupted.

Maturity

Beta. The file layer (packages, slides, text, graphics, tables, charts, comments, animations, themes, links, media, notes, masters, equations, accessibility, deck assembly, sweeps, export) is covered by an 885-test suite, including validation that generated decks open clean in real PowerPoint, and the server passes a raw stdio protocol round-trip suite. Live editing of decks open in PowerPoint runs every call through one process-wide lock with dialog detection at the window layer and bounded timeouts, and ships with its own COM gate scripts (tests/com_gates/). It has not yet had a long field life; treat important decks with the respect the backup tools make easy, and expect fast point releases.

License

AGPL-3.0-only (see LICENSE and NOTICE.md). Free for personal, academic, and open-source use. If you want to embed it in closed-source commercial software, open an issue to discuss a commercial license.

Family

Sibling of KitchenSink4Word (the same engineering for .docx; site).