A slide deck is sent as PDF far more often than as PPTX. Conference organisers and course systems ask for it, clients open attachments on their phones, and a PDF looks the same whether the reader has PowerPoint, Keynote or nothing at all. It also keeps people from editing your slides. What a PDF cannot do is run a presentation, and that is where the surprises come from.
What the converter produces
We convert the PPTX on our own server with standard PDF export settings. You get one PDF page per slide, and the page has the size of the slide. A standard 16:9 deck (13.333 × 7.5 inches, 33.867 × 19.05 cm) gives landscape pages of exactly that size, not A4. Text stays real text that you can search, select and copy. Shapes, charts and diagrams remain vector graphics, and hyperlinks stay clickable.
| In the presentation | In the PDF |
|---|---|
| Visible slides | one page each |
| Hidden slides | left out |
| Speaker notes, comments | not included |
| Animations | all objects shown at once, as in the editing view |
| Transitions | stored as PDF page transitions, shown only by some viewers |
| Video and audio | the still frame visible on the slide |
| Pictures | kept at their full resolution |
Animations and transitions in a PDF
Each PDF page is a static picture of the slide. Every object with an entrance animation is visible from the start, and objects meant to replace each other on click, such as three captions stacked on the same spot, land on top of one another. Motion paths are ignored and the object stays where it sits in the editor. If a build-up matters in the handout, duplicate the slide in PowerPoint once per step, delete the objects that are not shown yet from each copy, and convert again. Decks prepared for print are made the same way.
Slide transitions are written into the PDF as page transitions. Adobe Acrobat Reader plays some of them in full-screen mode (Ctrl+L). Browsers, macOS Preview and phone apps ignore them. Nothing breaks either way.
Speaker notes missing in the PDF
Our converter exports slides only, so the notes you write under each slide are not in the PDF. If you need them, for a colleague who will give the talk or for a handout with talking points:
- PowerPoint for Windows: File › Export › Create PDF/XPS › Options › Publish what: Notes pages.
- PowerPoint for Mac cannot include notes in its PDF export, as Microsoft's own guide states. Print with the Notes layout and choose Save as PDF instead.
- LibreOffice Impress, free on Windows, macOS and Linux: File › Export as PDF, tick Export Notes Page; the notes pages are added after the slides. The LibreOffice help lists every option.
Fonts changed or text overflowing the box
A PPTX usually stores font names, not the fonts. For the classic Office fonts our server has replacements with identical character widths: Carlito for Calibri, Caladea for Cambria, Liberation for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New. Text set in them wraps exactly as in PowerPoint. Aptos, the default font of new Microsoft 365 decks since 2023, Segoe UI, Google Fonts such as Montserrat and corporate typefaces are not installed and get substituted. A wider substitute can break a title onto a second line or push the last bullet out of its box. If the look must be exact, export from PowerPoint on a computer that has the fonts, or switch the theme fonts to Calibri or Arial before uploading.
Embedded video, and PDFs that are too large
Video and audio do not play in the converted PDF. The slide shows the frame PowerPoint displays while the video is stopped, the so-called poster frame. Pick a meaningful one in PowerPoint and put a visible link to the video on the slide, for example to YouTube, so readers can still watch it.
Pictures are not downsampled during export. A deck with twenty photos straight from a camera can easily give a PDF of tens of megabytes, too much for many mail servers and upload forms. Run Picture Format › Compress Pictures in PowerPoint first (150 ppi is plenty for screens and handouts) and the PDF shrinks with it.
Format background, and when PowerPoint is easier
PowerPoint first appeared in 1987. Its XML-based PPTX format has been the default since PowerPoint 2007 and is standardised as ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500, see the Library of Congress description. PDF itself is ISO 32000. More on the source format on our PPTX page. Older decks in the binary PPT format convert the same way.
If you have PowerPoint, its own export is the most faithful, because it renders with the original fonts. Google Slides (File › Download › PDF document) and Keynote (File › Export To › PDF) do the job too. Our converter is the practical choice on Linux, a Chromebook or a phone, for a file someone sent you that you only need to read or print, or for up to ten decks at once. The PPTX is deleted right after conversion, the PDF after 14 days. Need the slides as images? Convert the PDF further with PDF to JPG. For Word files there is DOCX to PDF.