About PowerPoint to PDF
A slide deck is awkward to send. Fonts are missing on the other machine, animations misfire, a theme changes and the title that fitted on one line now wraps. A PDF turns each slide into a fixed page, so it looks the same on a phone, a laptop or a printer.
This tool converts a .pptx, .ppt or .odp presentation into a PDF with one page per slide. The slides are laid out by a real office suite, so fonts, colours and arrangement are kept as far as the converting machine allows. This conversion runs on our conversion service rather than in your browser, because an office suite cannot run in a web page. The file is uploaded, converted and deleted as soon as the answer has been sent back. It is free, and there is no account.
How to convert a PowerPoint to PDF
- Choose your presentation. Accepted types are .pptx, .ppt and .odp.
- Press the convert button. The deck is uploaded, converted and sent back, which takes a little longer when the slides contain many large pictures.
- Page through the preview. Look at slides with unusual fonts, charts and overlapping shapes, which are where differences show up.
- Save the PDF.
- If you want the result to be smaller, run it through Compress PDF, since slides with photographs can produce a large file.
When you would use it
- Sharing a deck after a meeting so that people can read it without PowerPoint.
- Printing handouts that are guaranteed to look like the slides.
- Submitting a presentation to a conference or a course portal that asks for PDF.
- Archiving a final version that nobody can accidentally change.
- Preparing slides for a PDF reader in a meeting room whose software you do not trust.
What it will not do
- It produces a static document. Animations, transitions, embedded video, audio and speaker notes do not carry over.
- Fonts that are not available to the converting machine are swapped for similar ones, which can move text a little. Use common fonts, or embed them, if exact appearance matters.
- Each slide becomes one page at the slide’s own proportions, and there is no option to put several slides on a page.
- A deck larger than about 50 megabytes will be refused, and only a couple of your conversions can run at once.
- It does not go the other way with the same fidelity. PDF to PowerPoint puts each page on a slide with its text as editable boxes, but it is a reconstruction.
How it compares
PowerPoint’s own export is the most faithful when you have the app and the fonts. This tool is for the machine without it, or a deck in another format, or a quick conversion on a phone.
Browser tools that try to draw slides in a web page tend to get shadows, gradients and theme fonts wrong. Using a real office suite avoids most of that, at the cost of the file being sent to a server and removed afterwards.
Tips
- Look at the first slide of the result before you read the rest. If the title font changed, the rest will have too.
- For a smaller file, reduce the images in the deck before converting, or run the result through Compress.