PowerPoint to PDF

How to turn a presentation into a PDF

Drop the file in. The slides are read in your browser, you are told what was found and what cannot be carried over, and the first slide is shown before anything is saved.

1. Drop the .pptx file on the box above. It is not uploaded.
2. Read what was found, and anything that will be missing.
3. Press Make the PDF. Each slide becomes one page, the same shape as the slide.
4. Look at the first slide, then save it.

Why a slide is harder than a page

A Word document flows: its words run on and break where the page is full, so a converter only has to follow the words. A slide does not flow at all. Every box on it has a fixed place, and the job is to put each one back exactly there with its words inside it.

The catch is that a slide says very little about itself. A title on a slide is usually just its words. Where the box sits, how big the letters are, what colour they are and whether they are centred live in the layout the slide was built on, and in the master behind that. So every question is asked three times - of the slide, its layout and its master - and the first answer wins. That is how PowerPoint templates work, and without following it every title comes out small, black and in the top corner.

The same goes for colours. Most colours in a deck are names - accent 1, text 1 - looked up in the theme and then made lighter or darker by a percentage. Those are worked out too, so a dark template stays dark and its white text stays white.

What is carried over, and what is not

What comes over: the text in every box, with its size, bold and italic, colour, alignment and bullets; pictures; tables, as a plain grid without the table style's colours; solid backgrounds and background pictures; filled boxes and circles; and whatever the template puts on every slide, such as a logo or a coloured band. Boxes with more words than room are shrunk to fit, the way PowerPoint does it.

What does not: charts, SmartArt, video, sound, animations, speaker notes, shadows, and gradients beyond their first colour. Hidden slides are left out, as they are in a slide show. Every one of these is counted and said on screen before you make the PDF, so nothing goes missing without you knowing.

The typefaces are not carried over either. A PDF can only use a handful of built-in fonts unless it carries the font files themselves, so the text is set in Helvetica. Lines can break in slightly different places from the original for that reason.

When to use PowerPoint instead

If the deck is full of charts and SmartArt, or its look depends on a particular typeface, save it as PDF from PowerPoint, Keynote or LibreOffice Impress, which draw it with their own engines. This tool is for everything else: the deck you have to send and cannot or will not upload to a stranger's server to convert.