node-pptx-templater
Tables8 min read

Rectangular Table Spans & Auto-Pagination

Handling complex rowspan/gridspan cell merges, row striping, and auto-pagination across slide overflows.

1Row Merging & Nested Data

Standard OpenXML tables can be easily corrupted if vertical merge (vMerge) or horizontal merge (hMerge) attributes are mismatched. node-pptx-templater automatically manages grid coordinates, span calculations, and cell hiding rules.

2Auto-Pagination with splitTableOnOverflow

When dynamically generating tables with 50+ rows from database records, tables frequently spill off the bottom of the slide. splitTableOnOverflow calculates row heights, detects boundary collisions, deep-clones the parent slide, repeats header rows, and paginates rows cleanly across subsequent slides.

javascript
ppt.useSlide(3);

// Add 60 rows from SQL query
for (const record of queryResults) {
  ppt.addTableRow('InventoryTable', [
    record.sku,
    record.name,
    record.warehouse,
    record.quantity
  ]);
}

// Automatically split across new slides if it exceeds slide height
await ppt.splitTableOnOverflow('InventoryTable', {
  bottomMargin: '1in',
  repeatHeaders: 1
});