What comes across, and what doesn't
Text boxes and placeholders (titles, subtitles, bullet lists) become editable text in the same position, keeping the font size, colour, alignment and bullet characters from the slide. Rectangles, rounded rectangles, ovals and diamonds become shapes with their fill and outline colours; lines and connectors become lines, with arrowheads where the slide had them. Tables are rebuilt cell by cell, so every cell is its own editable text. Pictures in PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP and SVG are placed at their original position and size.
Some things can't be redrawn faithfully on a whiteboard, and the tool says so rather than faking it. Charts become a labelled box naming the chart type, its title, its series and its categories. SmartArt becomes a box listing the diagram's text in order, which is usually what you want to brainstorm over anyway. Old Windows clip art (EMF/WMF files), linked media and embedded objects become placeholders. After every conversion you see a count of what was converted and a plain note about anything that was summarised.
Two limits are worth knowing. The whiteboard's text has no bold weight, so bold is kept as hidden metadata rather than shown, and custom fonts fall back to a standard sans-serif. Animations, transitions and slide timings are ignored, since a whiteboard has no timeline.
How a .pptx file is put together
A .pptx file is a ZIP archive of XML files in the Office Open XML format, standardised as ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500. Rename one to .zip and you can open it: each slide is its own file under ppt/slides/, pictures sit in ppt/media/, charts are separate parts under ppt/charts/, and SmartArt stores its text in ppt/diagrams/. Each slide also inherits from a slide layout and a slide master, which is where a placeholder with no position of its own gets its size and location, and where a repeating logo or footer bar lives.
Positions are stored in English Metric Units — 914,400 to the inch and 12,700 to the point — so a default 16:9 slide is 12,192,000 by 6,858,000 units, or 13.33 by 7.5 inches. The converter reads that slide size, scales every shape onto a 1280 by 720 frame (1024 by 768 for 4:3 decks), and resolves inheritance from layouts and masters so titles land where PowerPoint puts them. This also explains the most common failure: an older .ppt file from PowerPoint 97–2003 is a different, binary format, and has to be re-saved as .pptx before any tool that reads Office Open XML can open it.
Ways people use a deck-as-whiteboard
Workshop facilitators drop in the session deck and run the exercise on top of it — dot-voting next to the options slide, sticky notes around the problem statement, arrows connecting ideas across slides. Because every slide is already on the board, there is no screenshotting and pasting slide by slide into a separate whiteboard tool.
Teachers put a lesson on one canvas so a class can annotate it together, or keep the speaker notes visible under each slide as a teaching script. Retrospective and planning meetings reuse last sprint's review deck as the starting board. And for anyone reviewing a pitch or a report, seeing all the slides at once is the fastest way to spot a storyline that repeats itself, skips a step, or buries the conclusion on slide 14.
Privacy: the deck is read on your own device
Decks tend to hold things that shouldn't be uploaded to a random website: unreleased numbers, client names, internal plans. This tool unzips and reads the file with JavaScript running in your browser tab; nothing is sent to a server, and closing the tab discards it. Files up to 100 MB and 200 slides open, with safety checks against malformed or deliberately oversized archives.
The only thing that leaves the page is the finished board, and only if you press the button to open it in OmniCanvas. Exporting to PNG, SVG or an .excalidraw file happens locally and needs no account.
Keep working on it in OmniCanvas
The board you see here is temporary — it lives in this tab. Opening it in OmniCanvas turns it into a note on an infinite canvas that saves automatically and syncs across your devices. Each slide stays a slide frame, so you can still present it slide by slide, reorder slides, and keep drawing around them.
For very image-heavy decks, OmniCanvas can also import the .pptx file directly, which keeps every picture at full resolution; the hand-off from this page shrinks large pictures so the board fits. If your material started as a PDF instead, the PDF visual outline tool gives the same kind of one-page overview for documents.