Turn a PowerPoint Deck into a Readable PDF
or drop files here
Drop a .pptx and get back a printable document of what the slides and speaker notes actually say. A confidential pitch deck is unpacked by a background thread of this tab and stays on your computer.
From slides to a handout.
Add the deck
Drop in a .pptx file. Decks saved in the older .ppt format need a quick Save As to .pptx in PowerPoint or Impress first.
Shape the handout
Defaults are landscape pages, a 14 pt sans-serif face and a fresh page per slide. Change paper, margins, text size or font if you like.
Convert and save
Press Convert to PDF, flick through the pages in the viewer, then save the handout. A different deck can follow straight away.
When the words matter more than the design.
A slide deck is built to be projected. Once the talk is over, people usually need its content in a form they can read, print and search.
Handouts for the room
Give the audience the content of the talk on paper, with no dark backgrounds to drain the printer and wide margins for their own notes.
Reading a deck without Office
A client sent a .pptx and your laptop has no PowerPoint. Convert it here and read every slide and note in any PDF viewer.
A script for rehearsal
With speaker notes printed beside each slide title, the PDF doubles as a run sheet you can mark up while practising the talk.
Archiving course material
Training decks pile up. A searchable PDF of each one lets you find the slide that mentioned a policy or a figure years later.
Proofreading every slide
Typos hide in small text boxes. Laid out as continuous prose, the wording of a whole deck is far easier to check in one sitting.
Lecture notes for students
Teachers can share the substance of a lecture deck as a compact document that prints well and works on a phone screen.
What survives the trip from PPTX to PDF
Two quite different jobs go by the name "PowerPoint to PDF". One is a snapshot: every slide frozen exactly as it looks on screen, theme and all. PowerPoint, Keynote and LibreOffice Impress do that well with their own Export to PDF command, because they contain the full slide renderer. The other is a transcript: the content of the deck lifted out of its boxes and set as a document. That second job is what this page does.
Under the hood, Pandoc opens the .pptx (which is a zip of XML parts) and walks the slides in order, collecting each title, its text and lists, its tables and the pictures it references. The notes page behind each slide is read separately and placed under that slide in a shaded box. Typst then lays the material out on landscape pages with justified text, starting a new page at every slide unless you switch that off.
A practical tip: titles make the handout easier to scan. Each slide becomes a heading, and a slide without a title is labelled with its number instead (Slide 7), so a quick pass to title the untitled ones pays off. Speaker notes are worth tidying too, since they are printed in full.
| In the deck | In the PDF |
|---|---|
| Slide titles | Kept as headings; each one opens a new page by default |
| Body text and bullet points | Kept as paragraphs and lists |
| Tables | Kept as real tables, header row in bold |
| Pictures, photos, logos | Kept, scaled to the width of the text |
| Speaker notes | Kept as text with their slide |
| Charts and SmartArt | Not drawn |
| Theme, background, colours, fonts | Replaced by a plain layout |
| Text box positions | Content flows top to bottom |
| Animations, transitions, video, audio | Left out |
Questions answered.
Will the PDF look exactly like my slides?
So when is this the right tool?
Are speaker notes included?
Can I convert an old .ppt file?
What happens to charts, SmartArt and diagrams?
How do I fit more than one slide on a page?
Can I search and copy the text in the PDF?
Why does the first conversion take a while?
Does my presentation get uploaded?
More tools you might need.
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