Convert PowerPoint to PDF

One slide, one page — and what cannot come with it

Each slide becomes one page at the slide's own dimensions, so a 16:9 deck produces a 16:9 PDF rather than slides letterboxed onto A4. That is usually right and occasionally not: if the PDF is going to be printed on paper, set the slide size in PowerPoint to A4 or Letter before converting, because scaling a widescreen page onto portrait paper at print time leaves margins nobody chose.

What survives is everything with a visual existence. The theme, the master slide graphics, backgrounds and gradients, charts, SmartArt, tables, grouped shapes and pictures are all laid out where the deck puts them, and text stays real selectable text rather than becoming part of a picture. Hyperlinks become working link annotations. Hidden slides are skipped, exactly as they are when you present.

Animations, transitions and builds do not exist in a PDF and cannot be approximated. This is worth understanding rather than merely accepting, because it changes what you should do before converting: a slide whose content appears in five animated steps is flattened to its final state, with all five layers visible at once — which is frequently an unreadable pile of overlapping text. If a deck relies on builds, duplicate the slide and stage the content manually before converting. Speaker notes are not included either; the output is the slides as an audience sees them.

Embedded video and audio are dropped to a still frame or nothing at all, since a PDF page cannot play them. Fonts that the presentation did not embed are substituted with the closest available match, which can shift a line of text slightly within its box — the usual symptom is a title that fitted on one line wrapping onto two. If our server is unreachable, the page says so and rebuilds the deck locally, keeping text boxes and pictures at their positions while simplifying themes, charts and backgrounds.

When you want something else

To include speaker notes, or to get handouts with several slides to a page, PowerPoint's own Export is the only thing that will do it — those are layouts it generates rather than content it stores, so no converter reading the file can produce them. LibreOffice Impress offers the same export options if PowerPoint is not to hand.

For a deck you would rather not send anywhere, or for a folder of them, soffice --headless --convert-to pdf deck.pptx does this conversion locally and in bulk. It is free, it is the same conversion this page performs, and nothing crosses the network.