How to keep the videos when you turn PowerPoint into a PDF
Last updated 27 September 2026
You send the slides as a PDF so they look the same everywhere, and every video becomes a still picture. PowerPoint does that on purpose. Here is how to make a PDF that still has the videos in it.
Make the PDF
- Save your deck as .pptx. The old .ppt cannot be read.
- Open PowerPoint video to PDF and drop the .pptx. It is not uploaded.
- Read what was found: how many videos, and how big they are.
- For a big deck, choose High quality, smaller, or Small enough to email. Choose the language of the words under the video.
- Press Make the PDF and save it. Each slide is one page, and each video sits on its slide with a play button.
A video that was only linked in PowerPoint, not inserted, lives on the computer of whoever made it, not in the file, so it cannot be carried over. You are told if there is one.
Tell the person you send it to where it plays
Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free on Windows and Mac: a click plays the video right on the slide.
Open a PDF on this site: the video plays on the slide in any browser, on a computer or a phone.
Preview on a Mac and the Files app on an iPhone cannot play video in a PDF. They show a Play video button instead, which opens the file on this site at that slide.
Chrome, Edge and Firefox cannot play it. Open the file in Acrobat Reader or in Open a PDF.
Keep it small enough to email
A video weighs far more than slides. Small enough to email aims for a PDF under 20 MB, which fits most email. For a long video, a shared drive link is the better way to send it.
Do not run the finished PDF through a compressor that rebuilds pages as pictures: that would throw the videos away again. The video choices in the tool itself are the way to make it smaller.