Manage Slide Sections in Presentations with Python

Overview

With Aspose.Slides for Python, you can organize a PowerPoint presentation into sections that group specific slides.

You may want to create sections to organize or divide a presentation into logical parts in these situations:

• When you’re working on a large presentation with a team and need to assign certain slides to specific colleagues.
• When you’re dealing with a presentation that contains many slides and find it difficult to manage or edit everything at once.

Ideally, create sections that group related slides—those that share a theme, topic, or purpose—and give each section a name that clearly reflects its contents.

Create Sections in Presentations

To add a Section that groups slides in a presentation, Aspose.Slides provides the add_section method. It lets you specify the section name and the slide where the section begins.

The following Python example shows how to create a section in a presentation:

import aspose.slides as slides

with slides.Presentation() as presentation:
    layout_slide = presentation.layout_slides[0]

    slide1 = presentation.slides.add_empty_slide(layout_slide)
    slide2 = presentation.slides.add_empty_slide(layout_slide)
    slide3 = presentation.slides.add_empty_slide(layout_slide)
    slide4 = presentation.slides.add_empty_slide(layout_slide)

    section1 = presentation.sections.add_section("Section 1", slide1)
    # Section 1 ends at slide2; Section 2 starts at slide3.
    section2 = presentation.sections.add_section("Section 2", slide3) 
      
    presentation.save("presentation_sections.pptx", slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)
    
    presentation.sections.reorder_section_with_slides(section2, 0)
    presentation.save("reordered_sections.pptx", slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)
    
    presentation.sections.remove_section_with_slides(section2)
    presentation.sections.append_empty_section("Last empty section")
    presentation.save("presentation_with_empty_section.pptx",slides.export.SaveFormat.PPTX)

Change the Names of Sections

After creating a Section in a PowerPoint presentation, you may decide to change its name.

The following Python example shows how to rename a section in a presentation:

import aspose.slides as slides

with slides.Presentation("sample.pptx") as presentation:
   section = presentation.sections[0]
   section.name = "My section"

FAQ

Are sections preserved when saving to the PPT (PowerPoint 97–2003) format?

No. The PPT format does not support section metadata, so section grouping is lost when saving to .ppt.

Can an entire section be “hidden”?

No. Only individual slides can be hidden. A section as an entity has no “hidden” state.

Can I quickly find a section by a slide and, conversely, the first slide of a section?

Yes. A section is uniquely defined by its starting slide; given a slide you can determine which section it belongs to, and for a section you can access its first slide.