Content generated by an LLM with human direction.

Cut, copy, and paste

The rule

What a paste does depends on where you paste and what's on the clipboard.

Pasting onto the canvas (nothing being edited) adds a new element:

• An image, SVG, or PDF copied from another app (Excel, Pages, Preview, a browser, a screenshot) → inserted as an image element. Eigendeck reads the richest form available, preferring vector (SVG) → PDF → PNG/JPEG, so a chart copied from Office comes in as crisp vector art rather than a bitmap when the app offers both.
• A file copied in Finder / Explorer / Files (select an image, SVG, or PDF file in the file manager and copy it) → inserted from the file's bytes, exactly like dragging the file onto the slide.
• Rich HTML with no image on the clipboard — a Google Sheets / Excel range, a Google Docs or Word selection, a chunk of a web page → Eigendeck renders that HTML in your deck's font and drops it in as a picture (see below). This is how you get a spreadsheet table onto a slide.
• Otherwise (plain text only) → nothing is added to the canvas; paste into a text box instead.

Pasting into a text box (double-click to edit first) inserts text. Formatting from outside Eigendeck is dropped — you get clean plain text in the box's own style — unless the clipboard came from Eigendeck itself (copying a selection inside another text box keeps its bold/italic/super-/subscript/color).

Copying and pasting whole elements (select, ⌘C, ⌘V) duplicates them; across slides this is also how you set up animations — see Sync and link.

HTML pastes become a picture

When you paste a table or other formatted HTML onto the canvas, Eigendeck:

1. lays the HTML out in your deck body font (so it looks on-brand, not like whatever font the source used), then
2. screenshots it to an image and inserts that, centered.

So a pasted table is a normal image element: it scales, moves, exports, and shows up in thumbnails like any other picture — no live spreadsheet, no surprise reflow when you present.

What carries over: the cell text, bold / italic, text and background colors, alignment, and the borders you actually set in the source. What's intentionally replaced: the typeface (always your deck font).

One honest caveat for Google Sheets: Sheets includes its faint default gridlines in the copied HTML even when you haven't set any borders, so an "unbordered" range pastes with that light grey grid. To control the lines, set (or clear) real borders in Sheets before copying — those render exactly as you set them.

The reasoning

A picture, not a live table, is a deliberate choice. A slide needs to look the same every time you present it and when you export to PDF or HTML; a rasterized snapshot is frozen and predictable, and it travels inside the deck with no external dependency. Rendering through the browser (rather than re-implementing spreadsheet layout) means any HTML works — lists, headings, quotes, mixed formatting — not just one app's tables. Forcing the deck font keeps pasted content consistent with the rest of your slides.

Workflow

• Spreadsheet table: select the range in Sheets/Excel, copy, click the slide (don't be editing a text box), paste. Resize the resulting image like any picture.
• Want specific lines: set the borders in the spreadsheet first; clear them for a borderless look (mind the Sheets default-gridline caveat above).
• Updating a pasted table: it's a snapshot, so re-copy from the source and paste again to replace it.
• Just the text, no styling: paste into a text box instead of onto the canvas, or use Paste as… → Text.