Convert PDF to PowerPoint

What a slide is made of here

Each page arrives as two layers. Everything that was drawn — rules, fills, logos, charts, photographs — is rendered to a single picture and placed as the slide background; the real text is then placed on top of it in its own boxes, at the coordinates it occupied in the PDF. That split is what makes the result both editable and faithful: the words are genuinely words you can retype, and everything else looks exactly as it did, because it is a photograph of exactly as it did.

The slide size is taken from the first page and applied to every slide. Almost every PDF is uniform and this is invisible, but a document that mixes portrait pages with a landscape appendix will have the appendix letterboxed or cropped into the shape of page one. Split the document before converting if it changes orientation partway through. A PDF page is also rarely 16:9 — an A4 page becomes an A4-shaped slide, which presents correctly but will sit inside black bars on a widescreen projector until you change the slide size in PowerPoint.

Text boxes are created per line, not per paragraph, because a line is the largest unit whose position a PDF actually records. Positions are therefore exact, and editing a sentence that wraps means editing two boxes. Fonts are substituted, since the PDF's embedded faces cannot be installed on the machine that opens the deck, so a line may set slightly wider or narrower than the picture behind it. Control characters are stripped on the way out — they are illegal in the XML a .pptx is made of, and they are the specific reason a converted file sometimes opens with "PowerPoint found a problem with content".

Nothing that makes a presentation a presentation can be recovered, because none of it survived the trip into PDF. There are no speaker notes, no transitions or animations, no master slides and no outline view — the result is a deck of visually correct, individually editable slides rather than a reconstruction of the original presentation.

When you want something else

If the deck this PDF was printed from still exists anywhere, open that instead. No converter can restore animations, notes and masters that are not in the file, and five minutes spent finding the original beats any amount of cleanup.

For a large document, LibreOffice does the same conversion from the command line — soffice --headless --convert-to pptx --infilter="impress_pdf_import" in.pdf — which is worth it past a few dozen pages, and it reconstructs some vector artwork as editable shapes rather than flattening everything to a picture. It is slower per page and less predictable about layout, which is the trade.