Adding Text Box and Text to Slides

Need to transfer a lot of data from an Excel file to a PowerPoint for your report?

How can you automate such repetitive tasks?

With python-pptx, you can programmatically transfer large amounts of data to a PowerPoint file.

In this lesson, we will learn how to add a text box to a slide and insert text into it using Python.

To input text on a slide, you first need to create a text box to contain the text.

A text box provides a space on the slide where text can be written, specifying the position and size for the text.

While the position of a text box is typically specified in points (pt), you can also use units such as inches, centimeters (cm), or EMUs.

To specify or convert units, you can use classes like Inches, Cm, Pt, and Emu from the pptx.util module.

For example, pptx.util.Inches(1) represents 1 inch, and pptx.util.Cm(2) represents 2 centimeters.

You can add a text box to a desired location on your slide using the slide.shapes.add_textbox() method from the python-pptx library.

Here is a simple example code to generate and place a text box on a slide.

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from pptx import Presentation
# Convert length units using the Inches module
from pptx.util import Inches

# Create a Presentation object
prs = Presentation()

# Add a slide
slide = prs.slides.add_slide(prs.slide_layouts[5])

# Add a text box (1 inch from the left, 1 inch from the top)
left = Inches(1)
top = Inches(1)

# Text box size (5 inches wide, 1 inch high)
width = Inches(5)
height = Inches(1)

# Create the text box
textbox = slide.shapes.add_textbox(left, top, width, height)

# Get the text frame from the text box
text_frame = textbox.text_frame

# Add text
text_frame.text = "Hello, World!"

# Save the file
prs.save('output_file.pptx')

When you run the above code, a PowerPoint file named output_file.pptx is created, with the slide containing the text "Hello, World!".

The text box is positioned 1 inch from the left and 1 inch from the top of the slide, with dimensions of 5 inches in width and 1 inch in height.