PowerPoint import drops all speaker notes — blocks migration for any deck where notes matter
Steve D
What I did
Imported an 8-slide .pptx into Gamma. Every slide had speaker notes
attached in PowerPoint. I chose the faithful / as-is import option.
What happened
Slides, body text, and images all came across correctly — no complaints
there. Every speaker note was silently dropped. All eight cards arrived
with empty notes panels, and there was no warning during import that
anything had been discarded.
What I expected
Notes present in the source file land in each card's speaker notes panel.
Why this matters more than it looks
At 8 slides I just retyped them and moved on. That's why you probably
don't hear about this much. At 70 slides nobody retypes anything — they
conclude Gamma can't take their existing decks and they don't migrate.
The users this hurts worst never become users, so they never file a
ticket. I'd guess that's why this gap has stayed open.
It also cuts against your own docs. Your import article says content can
come in "exactly as-is." Your speaker notes article describes notes as a
first-class feature. Neither one mentions that the two don't connect,
so there's no way to find this out except by losing the notes.
The fix
PPTX stores notes in ppt/notesSlides/notesSlideN.xml, related to each
slide by an explicit relationship. Mapping that to the card notes panel
is a direct one-to-one — the data is already structured and labeled in
the file you're parsing. Google Slides and Keynote both round-trip
these on .pptx import and export.
Two questions
- Is speaker note import on the roadmap, and is there any timeline?
- Does the reverse work — when I export a Gamma deck to .pptx, do card
notes get written into the PowerPoint notes pane? I haven't tested it
and your docs don't say.
Nik Payne (Gamma design)
Hey Steve D, thanks for the super detailed writeup (and for digging into the PPTX structure). Totally hear you on this being a silent migration killer when notes matter.
I’m going to pass this to the team as: “PPTX faithful import drops all speaker notes with no warning; needs 1:1 mapping into card speaker notes, or at least an explicit import warning.”
Quick question so we can route it correctly: when you imported, did you see any import summary/warnings at all, or was it completely clean while the notes just came in empty?
On your two questions: I can’t promise roadmap/timeline here, and I also don’t want to guess on whether PPTX export writes notes back out. If you can share the link to the specific docs pages you mentioned, I’ll include that in the report so we can get the docs aligned either way.