PowerPoint to PDF

Text only: no images, no design

Worth knowing in the first ten seconds, because it decides whether this is what you want.

This reads the text stored inside the presentation and reformats it. What does not come across: images, charts, tables, diagrams, shapes, colours, fonts, the theme, backgrounds, animations and the positions of anything on the slide.

So what you get is an outline of what the deck said, not a copy of what it looked like.

That is genuinely useful for a set of real jobs: reading a long deck quickly without clicking through it, making a text handout, getting the content into a document or an email, quoting from a presentation, searching a deck for a phrase, checking what is in a file before opening it, or turning someone's slides into notes.

It is not useful if the slides carry their meaning visually — a design deck, a chart-heavy report, anything where the pictures are the point.

If you wanted a PDF that looks like your slides

A lot of people arrive at a converter wanting a visual PDF of their deck. If that is you, the best tool is the one you already have, and it is free.

In PowerPoint, use File → Export → Create PDF/XPS, or File → Save As and choose PDF. In Google Slides, File → Download → PDF Document. In Keynote, File → Export To → PDF. In LibreOffice Impress, File → Export as PDF.

Every one of those is perfect, because the program that drew the slides is the thing best placed to render them. Fonts are right, charts are right, positions are exact. No online converter — paid or free — beats it, and you do not have to upload a confidential deck to anyone.

One extra tip while you are there: in PowerPoint's export dialog, Options lets you publish handouts with several slides to a page, or include speaker notes. That is usually what someone actually wants when they ask for "a PDF of the deck".

Come back here when you want the words rather than the slides.

Two things to check in the output

Both come from how PowerPoint stores a slide, and knowing about them takes the surprise out.

The heading may be the wrong line. The first piece of text found on each slide becomes that slide's heading. Usually that is the title, because the title box is usually created first — but not always. If a slide's text boxes were added in an unusual order, or the title was added last, a bullet can end up as the heading and the real title becomes a bullet. It is obvious when it happens and takes a moment to swap.

The order follows the slide's internal structure, not the visual layout. Text comes out in the order the boxes are stored in the file, which is usually the order they were created. For an ordinary title-and-bullets slide that matches what you see. For a two-column slide, a slide with callouts and captions, or one that has been heavily rearranged, the text can come out interleaved or in an order that does not match how you read it on screen.

There is no setting for this — it is a consequence of the file format. For a deck built on standard layouts you will rarely notice; for a complex one, expect to do some reordering.

Speaker notes are not included. They are stored separately from the slides and are not read, so if the notes are what you are after, this will not get them.

How the output is laid out

The extracted text opens in a new window as a printable document, with each slide as its own page: a small "Slide 3 of 24" marker, the heading, then the bullets, inside a bordered box with generous margins.

From there, press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P) and choose Save as PDF as the destination — or use the Save as PDF button at the top of the window. Because each slide is set to start a new page, you get a clean one-slide-per-page document rather than a continuous run of text.

You can equally just select all and copy from that window if the text is headed into an email, a document or a notes app. The print layout is there when you want a handout; the text is there either way.

Two practical notes. Your browser must allow popups for this site or the window cannot open — if nothing happens, that is why, and the tool will tell you. And a slide with no text at all is marked as such rather than silently skipped, so the numbering always matches your deck.

Nothing is uploaded

The file is unpacked and read on your own device. That matters more for presentations than for most file types: decks are where pitches, strategy, client work, pricing and unreleased plans live, and every other tool for this job asks you to upload one to a server.

There is no size limit and no daily quota. Only .pptx files work — the modern format. An old .ppt file is a completely different, binary format and will not open; save it as .pptx in PowerPoint first.

Related tools

PDF to PowerPoint goes the other way, putting PDF pages onto slides as images. Extract Text from PDF does this job for PDFs, with Markdown and JSON output as well as plain text. Word to PDF handles Word documents.