About PDF to PowerPoint
Taking a PDF back into PowerPoint is a common need, because decks are often circulated only as PDFs. You want to reuse a diagram, fix a figure on a slide, or fold someone else’s pages into your own presentation.
This tool makes one slide for each page of your PDF, at the size the page was. The text comes in as editable text boxes in the same fonts and colours; the pictures, lines and filled shapes sit behind it. It runs in your browser, so the document is not uploaded.
How to convert a PDF to PowerPoint
- Choose the PDF.
- Pick a sharpness under "Sharpness". Screen is lightest, Good is the default, and Print gives the crispest pictures and the largest file.
- Press the button. Each page is read and rebuilt as a slide. Progress is shown, and a long document takes longer.
- Read the result line. It reports the number of slides and the number of text boxes created.
- Save the .pptx and open it in PowerPoint or a compatible program. Click on the text to edit it.
When you would use it
- Reusing slides from a deck you only have as a PDF.
- Correcting a typo or a figure on a slide after the source was lost.
- Turning pages from a report into slides for a presentation.
- Moving a one-page diagram into a deck where it can be restyled.
- Extracting editable text from pages so it can be rearranged.
What it will not do
- It reconstructs. Complicated pages with overlapping elements, unusual fonts or heavy effects can come out slightly differently from the PDF.
- A scanned page has no text to lift, so it comes in as a single picture.
- It does not bring back animations, transitions, notes or the original theme.
- Each page becomes one slide at that page’s proportions; a portrait page produces a portrait slide.
- For a Word document rather than a deck, use PDF to Word.
How it compares
Newer versions of PowerPoint can open some PDFs directly, with varying results. This tool is for when you want the result to keep fonts and colours, and when you do not have the desktop program to hand.
Other converters that run online send the file to a server. This one runs the conversion on your computer, which matters if the deck is not public yet.
Tips
- Check that the fonts are installed on the machine that opens the file. A missing font will be replaced and the text may move.
- If a page came in as a picture, run OCR PDF on the PDF first so the text becomes real text.
- Work through the result slide by slide. Select a text box to see its font. If the original used a font you do not have installed, PowerPoint will substitute one, and the line may wrap differently, which you can fix by resizing the box. Group the loose pictures if you want to move a diagram around as a single piece.