Built
backstage.
Ninja Tools is production tooling for live-event PowerPoint. Built for the operators, producers, and broadcast teams who use PowerPoint as part of the show system — not just to make slides.
Until it isn’t.
That’s where Ninja Tools comes in.”
Why it exists.
Backstage Ninja Tools started as a list of things that kept needing to be done manually, show after show. Position this shape precisely. Export this section as a separate file. Make the notes readable on the presenter monitor. Run the preflight before the deck goes on the show machine. Nothing complicated. Just things PowerPoint didn’t do, that came up on every real show.
PowerPoint is a general-purpose presentation tool. It’s used for pitch decks, school projects, quarterly reviews, and training materials. It’s also used to run live events in front of thousands of people, drive LED walls, feed broadcast systems, and cue presenter speeches at awards ceremonies. Those last uses get very little tooling attention from Microsoft. That’s the gap.
The suite started with the tools that were most obviously missing — precision shape controls, image fades, section export — and grew from there. Optimise Ninja came later, when it became clear that the biggest risk on show day wasn’t a missing tool in the ribbon; it was a deck with linked media, a machine with 4GB of RAM, and nobody having run a preflight.
Who it’s for.
Live-event graphics operators. The person at the laptop backstage, running the deck while the presenter is on stage. Cuing slides, managing media, fixing things that weren’t quite right when the rehearsal ran. The operator who has ten minutes before doors open and a deck that isn’t quite show-ready.
Conference and awards producers. The team building 200-slide decks for a gala dinner, coordinating assets from twelve suppliers, making sure the section for each presenter exports cleanly to a separate file before the show. The producer who discovers at 9pm that all the images in the deck are linked, not embedded.
Broadcast and AV teams. Running PowerPoint output into a vision mixer, outputting to an LED wall at a non-standard resolution, exporting slides as ProRes for a VT package. Teams for whom PowerPoint’s default export pipeline isn’t good enough for the output format the show requires.
Ninja Tools is not for casual PowerPoint users. It’s for the people for whom PowerPoint is a professional tool — part of the production chain, part of the show system — and who need it to behave like one.
Meet Stella.
Stella is the voice behind Ninja Tools — the copy, the design filter, the person who asks “does this actually work at showtime?” about every feature before it ships. Think of her as the calm, slightly smug backstage collaborator who’s seen the deck fall apart at 2am and already knows which tool fixes it.
She’s not corporate. She doesn’t talk about “streamlining workflows” or “empowering your team.” She talks about the specific problem — the tiny yellow handle, the linked media, the font that isn’t embedded, the notes box that’s too small to read under stage lights — and the specific fix.
Stella is the design partner and voice behind Ninja Tools. She’s based loosely on Lisa from Weird Science: confident, dry, technically useful, slightly smug about being faster than PowerPoint, friendly to operators under pressure, and never corporate waffle.
Every feature, every line of copy, and every decision about what ships gets run through Stella’s filter. Not “is this useful in general?” but “does this work during a live show, for someone who can’t stop the cue to fix a problem?”
Five questions.
Every feature.
Before anything ships in the Ninja Tools ribbon, it gets measured against five questions. Not design questions — show questions. The kind that only matter when there’s a live audience and no time to debug.
A modal dialog that locks PowerPoint while it processes is a problem backstage. Every tool that does meaningful work runs without freezing the interface. If it takes time, it says so — but the operator stays in control.
Unexpected focus changes during a live show are dangerous. A window that jumps to the foreground at the wrong moment can disrupt a cue. Nothing in the Ninja Tools suite is allowed to steal focus from PowerPoint during normal operation.
Surprises are for audiences. Operators need to know exactly what a tool does before they run it on a show. Clear labels, honest previews, no behaviour that differs from what the button says. If something irreversible is about to happen, say so first.
Where possible, every tool’s output should be undoable — either through PowerPoint’s standard undo, or by design (export tools produce a new file, not a replacement). Where a change is permanent, the operator is told before it happens, not after.
The final filter. A tool might be genuinely useful in the build phase but disastrous if accidentally triggered mid-show. Tools that carry that risk are clearly labelled, require confirmation, or are scoped to the pre-show workflow by design.
What’s in
the toolkit.
The suite currently has three products. Optimise Ninja is the front door — the show-readiness preflight scanner that almost anyone with a PowerPoint deck before a live show can use. Backstage Ninja Tools is the specialist suite — 20+ precision tools for operators who live inside PowerPoint and need more control than it natively offers. Presenter Notes Ninja is the show-safe notes display — for shows where the presenter needs readable cue pages on a dedicated monitor, synced to the slide deck.
More tools are in development. When they ship, Complete subscribers get them automatically. The suite grows with the workflows that actually need it.
Works alongside
Cued Up.
Live events often run both a presentation system and a separate teleprompt. The presenter reads from a screen; the operator follows from another. Presenter Notes Ninja and Cued Up sit one step apart in the same production chain. The Export Notes feature produces autocue-ready scripts. The notes display keeps the operator in sync with the show. The two tools are designed to work alongside each other without getting in each other’s way.
Ready to try
the tools?
Start with Optimise Ninja’s 14-day free trial. No card charged until day 15.