How to convert a PowerPoint deck to PDF

A .pptx file is a package of XML, images and font references that PowerPoint reassembles on the machine that opens it. That reassembly is where decks go wrong. A font you have and the reader does not gets substituted, and every text box using it reflows, so a title that fitted on one line arrives on two and pushes the subtitle off the slide. A PDF is the finished picture instead. Each slide is baked into a page with the glyphs, positions and colours already decided, so there is nothing left to reassemble and nothing left to guess.

What a PDF fixes, and what it costs

Converting the deck

1. Finish the deck firstA conversion is a snapshot. Any edit afterwards means converting again, so leave this until the content is settled and the typos are gone.
2. Upload the fileOpen PowerPoint to PDF and drop in the .pptx or .ppt. This one is a server tool: the file is uploaded over a secure connection, converted on our server, and deleted the moment it finishes.
3. Wait for the jobA 30-slide deck takes a few seconds. Files up to 100 MB are accepted and each job gets two minutes, which is ample unless every slide is a full-bleed photograph.
4. Check two slides, not all of themOpen the PDF and compare the title slide and whichever slide has the most text in the tightest box. Font substitution shows up in those two before anywhere else.
5. Check the page countYou want one page per slide. If a 24-slide deck produced 26 pages, you had two slides you thought were hidden, or a build that exported as separate states.
6. Send the PDF, keep the .pptxThe PDF is the copy that goes out. The deck stays with you, because the PDF is not a source file you can edit your way back into easily.

What does not survive the conversion

• Animations and builds. A slide that reveals four bullets one at a time becomes one page with all four bullets showing. If the build carried the meaning, split it into four slides before you convert.
• Slide transitions. Wipes, fades and pushes are properties of playback rather than of the slide, so there is nothing on the page to record them.
• Embedded video and audio. You get the poster frame if the deck had one, a blank rectangle if it did not. Put the video link on the slide as visible text so a reader of the PDF can still find it.
• Trigger and hover actions. Anything that needed a click in order to happen does not happen.
• Speaker notes, by default. There is a way round that, below.
• Some hyperlinks. Most converters keep them. A URL typed as text that PowerPoint auto-linked is more reliable than a link attached to a shape or a picture, so if a link matters, write the address out where the reader can see it.

Speaker notes, and why they are normally left out

Notes are not part of the slide. They live on a separate layout called the notes master, which puts a shrunken picture of the slide at the top of a portrait page and the notes text underneath. A straight conversion exports the slide layout only. That is exactly what you want when the deck is going to an audience, and exactly what you do not want when it is going to somebody presenting on your behalf.

To get the notes into a PDF, use PowerPoint's own print dialogue instead: File → Print, click the button reading Full Page Slides, choose Notes Pages, and set the destination to Microsoft Print to PDF on Windows or Save as PDF on a Mac. You get one portrait page per slide with the notes below it. That is a different document from the deck, so decide which one the recipient actually needs rather than sending both and hoping.

Keynote, Google Slides and Impress

• Apple Keynote: File → Export To → PDF. The image quality selector matters more than it looks. Good re-compresses photographs hard, Best keeps them close to the originals and produces a much larger file.
• Google Slides: File → Download → PDF Document. Notes are excluded. For a version with notes, go to File → Print preview first and pick a layout that includes them.
• LibreOffice Impress: File → Export as PDF, which exposes more controls than the others, including whether to export hidden slides and whether to embed the fonts.
• A .key or .odp that has to become a PDF on a machine without the application that made it: convert it to .pptx in its own application first, then convert that.

Size, and what to do about it

A deck built from phone photographs produces a large PDF, because the photographs are large. Twenty-four slides with a full-bleed image on each lands somewhere between 15 and 60 MB, past what most mail servers will accept as an attachment. Run the output through compress PDF, which works entirely inside your browser and uploads nothing. A photo-heavy deck typically comes down by 60 to 80 per cent at a quality nobody notices on a screen. Reducing a PDF for email has the target numbers for each mail service.

If the deck is going to paper rather than to a screen, converting it is only half the job. A PDF prints one slide per sheet by default, which turns 24 slides into 24 sheets of mostly margin. Printing slide handouts covers the settings that put the same deck on four.

Frequently asked questions