Summary

The goal of Thoc is to provide a set of useful tools for developers that increases speed and productivity when working with PowerPoint.

Techinal implementation

Thoc like most taskpane PPT Web-adins written with the Office JS API consists of two primary parts, the XML manifest and the "application", the XML manifest is a detailed description of how the addin interaces with PPT, the application is the collective term for the logic used in creating a web-app that is run inside the context of PPT

The application

The Thoc application is primarily utilizing a pure JS/TS frontend, any server could be used to serve the relevant content. from a static nginx dir response to templateing with Tera or Jinja using rust or python respectively. for the case of this application all development has been done using a simple Flask Python server.

Technology choices

to ease development the application uses the typescript definitions for the office api, and compiles to static JS using TSC, it also does styling with Tailwindcss,

i think the npm pacakge for the types is something like @types/office-js.

# to run TSC
$ npx tsc .\static\js\thoc.ts [--watch]

# to run tailwind
$ npx tailwindcss -i .\static\css\main.css -o .\static\css\tailwind.css [--watch]

# to run the server on windows [assuming venv]
.\Scripts\activate
python server.py

Requirements

you need a version of both Node and Python, a shared folder for testing the manifest file, and ofcrouse a modern version of powerpoint installed locally