morph-ppt

Morph

Generate visually compelling PPTs with smooth Morph animations.

Philosophy: Trust yourself to learn through practice. This skill provides workflow and references — you bring creativity and judgment.

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Use when

• User wants to generate a .pptx

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What is Morph?

PowerPoint's Morph transition creates smooth animations by matching shapes with identical names across adjacent slides.

Slide 1: shape name="!!circle" x=5cm  width=8cm
Slide 2: shape name="!!circle" x=20cm width=12cm
         ↓
Result: Circle smoothly moves and grows

Three core concepts:

• Scene Actors: Persistent shapes with !! prefix that evolve across slides
• Ghosting: Move shapes to x=36cm (off-screen) instead of deleting
• Content: Text/data added fresh per slide, previous content ghosted first

For details: reference/pptx-design.md

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Workflow

Phase 1: Understand the Topic

Ask only when topic is unclear, otherwise proceed directly.

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⚠️ CRITICAL KNOWN ISSUE: Name-based path selectors break after transition=morph is set After calling officecli set '/slide[N]' --prop transition=morph, paths like /slide[N]/!!my-shape return 'Element not found'. The CLI auto-prepends !! to shape names when morph is applied, which invalidates name-based lookups.

Workaround: Always use shape INDEX paths instead of name paths when accessing shapes on morph slides:

# WRONG (after transition=morph set):
officecli get deck.pptx '/slide[3]/!!my-circle' --depth 1

# CORRECT:
officecli get deck.pptx '/slide[3]' --depth 1  # first list all shapes to find index
officecli get deck.pptx '/slide[3]/shape[2]' --depth 1

The build.py template should use inspect() + index-based access throughout.

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Phase 2: Plan the Story

FIRST: Read the thinking framework

→ Open and read reference/decision-rules.md — it provides the structured approach for planning compelling presentations (Pyramid Principle, SCQA, page types).