The words of the enterprise presentation.

The .pptx extension denotes PowerPoint's default presentation format since the 2007 version. The file is a ZIP archive holding XML parts described by the OOXML standard, together with the embedded media. Other software reads the format, including LibreOffice Impress and Google Slides.

See alsoOOXMLEditable export

A board deck is the supporting document of a governance meeting, held by an executive committee or a board of directors. It combines figures, decision points and appendices, and often follows an imposed agenda. Its formatting is usually standardised from one quarter to the next, so that comparisons stay readable.

See alsoDeckBoard and executive committee deck

Brand guidelines are the document that sets the rules for using an organisation's visual identity: logo, colours, typography, imagery and tone. They are the reference that office templates translate into practice. In many companies, following them is a compliance requirement rather than an aesthetic preference.

See alsoBrand kitTemplate (.potx)AI that respects your template

A brand kit is the set of brand assets gathered for practical use: logos in several formats, colour codes, font files, images and usage rules. Inside a piece of software it is the machine-readable form of the brand guidelines, the one that produced documents draw from. It differs from the guidelines themselves, which are a written reference document.

See alsoBrand guidelinesTemplate ingestion

A data processing agreement frames the relationship between a controller and its processor, as Article 28 of the GDPR requires. It sets out the subject matter, duration and nature of the processing, the categories of data, the security measures and the list of subprocessors. It is usually annexed to the service contract.

See alsoData residency

Data residency is the country or region where data is stored at rest. It is a contractual or regulatory requirement, distinct from sovereignty, which concerns the applicable law, and from where processing happens, which can differ. A provider normally documents its residency in its data processing agreement and in its list of subprocessors.

See alsoEU hostingSecurity and GDPR

A deck is a set of slides forming one presentation document, whether projected or read on its own. The word is common in business usage and designates no particular file format. Hence the expressions sales deck, investor deck and board deck.

See alsoPitch deck

An editable export produces a file whose content remains modifiable in the target application: text stays text, shapes stay shapes, colours stay theme colours. For a presentation, that means a .pptx in which every object can be moved or rewritten in PowerPoint. It stands in contrast to an image export or a PDF, where the layout is frozen.

See also.pptx fileRasterisation

EU hosting means running a service and storing its data in data centres located on the territory of the European Union. It is frequently asked for in public tenders and security reviews, as one element of a GDPR compliance file. On its own, it says nothing about the subprocessors a service calls or about where their processing takes place.

See alsoData residencyData processing agreement (DPA)Security and GDPR

The footer is the set of three optional areas repeated at the bottom of slides: the date, a footer text and the slide number. These areas are defined in the master and in the layouts, then switched on slide by slide. Confidentiality notices are commonly placed there.

See alsoSlide master

Generative AI covers the models that produce new content — text, images, audio, code — from an instruction and from what they learned from training data. These models compute a likely continuation instead of looking facts up in a database, which is why they can produce false statements. Professional use therefore assumes human review.

See alsoLarge language model (LLM)Prompt-based generation

Generative engine optimization refers to the practices aimed at being cited by assistants and by search engines built on language models. It favours factual, structured, dated and sourced content that a model can quote without distorting it. It complements search engine optimisation rather than replacing it, since both rest on the same pages.

See alsoLarge language model (LLM)

A large language model is a neural network trained on very large text corpora to predict the continuation of a sequence. It processes text as tokens and has a context window that bounds how much text it can take into account at once. Recent models can also call external tools and process images.

See alsoGenerative AI

A layout defines the arrangement of placeholders for a given kind of slide, such as “Title and Content” or “Comparison”. Each layout belongs to a master from which it inherits colours, fonts and effects, and it can redefine the position and size of its own placeholders. Picking a layout rather than drawing free text boxes preserves the structure of the document.

See alsoSlide masterPlaceholder

A layout grid is the system of columns, gutters and margins that governs where elements sit on a slide. It is not a notion of the file format itself: it materialises through the position of placeholders in the layouts and through guides. A grid shared by every layout is what gives a deck its visual alignment.

See alsoLayout

Office Open XML is the office document format standardised as ISO/IEC 29500 and ECMA-376. It describes Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files as ZIP archives of XML parts linked to one another by relationships. It is the specification that tools writing Office files without Office have to follow.

See also.pptx file

A pitch deck is a short presentation meant to convince an external audience, a prospect or an investor. It usually covers the problem, the solution, the market, the business model and the team in around fifteen slides. Its main constraint is reading time, not exhaustiveness.

See alsoDeckSales pitch deck

A placeholder is a frame defined in a layout, meant to receive content: a title, text, an image, a table or a chart. It carries formatting inherited from the master, so text typed into a placeholder automatically adopts the intended typography. Content placed outside a placeholder inherits none of that formatting.

See alsoLayout

Prompt-based generation means producing a document from an instruction written in natural language and processed by a language model. The user describes the goal, the audience and the expected outline, and the model proposes content that still has to be checked and corrected. The quality of the result depends as much on the precision of the instruction as on the model used.

See alsoGenerative AI

Quarterly reporting is the periodic presentation of a business's results over a three-month period. It rests on consolidated figures, often coming from a spreadsheet, and compares the period with the previous one or with the target. Its value comes from keeping the same structure from quarter to quarter.

See alsoQuarterly reporting

Rasterisation converts a vector or text description into an image made of pixels. Applied to a slide, it yields a rendering faithful to the screen, but whose text can no longer be selected or edited. A presentation file whose slides are rasterised images cannot be reworked.

See alsoEditable export

An RFP response is the document a bidder submits to answer a public or private request for proposals. It follows the structure imposed by the requirements document and often reuses content from one response to the next. Failing to respect the requested format can get the bid rejected.

See alsoRFP response

A section is a named group of consecutive slides inside a presentation. It helps organise a long deck, reorder it in blocks and collapse it in the thumbnail pane. Sections have no effect on formatting.

Single sign-on lets a user reach several applications with one identity, managed by the company's identity provider. The protocols most common in enterprises are SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect. It centralises the granting of access and, above all, its revocation when someone leaves the organisation.

In PowerPoint, the slide master is the top-level slide of a presentation: it stores the colours, fonts, effects and placeholder positions inherited by every layout attached to it. A change made on the master cascades to the slides that depend on it, which makes it the entry point for consistent formatting. A presentation can contain several masters.

See alsoLayoutThemeAI that respects your template

Speaker notes are text attached to a slide, stored in a separate part of the file and hidden from the audience during a show. They appear in Presenter view and can be printed alongside the slides. They carry the spoken commentary or background information.

A PowerPoint template is a .potx file containing the masters, the layouts, the theme and, where relevant, sample slides. Opening a template creates a new .pptx presentation that inherits from it, leaving the original file untouched. Organisations use templates to distribute their standardised formatting.

See also.pptx fileSlide master

Template ingestion is the reading of an existing template by a piece of software, in order to extract its masters, layouts, theme, fonts and logos. It allows new documents to be produced in the formatting of the organisation rather than in a generic style. How faithful it is depends on the complexity of the template supplied.

See alsoBrand kitSlide masterAI that respects your template

A theme is a coordinated set of colours, fonts and effects applied to a document. It is stored inside the file and can be reused from one document to another, including between PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Switching theme replaces all of those attributes without touching the content.

See alsoTheme coloursTheme fonts

A theme palette has twelve named slots: four text and background colours, six accent colours and two hyperlink colours. Objects that reference one of these slots are recoloured when the palette changes, unlike colours entered as fixed values. This is the mechanism that keeps a colour scheme applied across a whole document.

See alsoThemeBrand guidelines

A theme defines two fonts: one for headings and one for body text. Text that references these slots follows the theme, whereas a font chosen explicitly stays fixed. A theme also declares substitute fonts for non-Latin scripts.

See alsoTheme