Convert PPTX to PDF

Not everyone has PowerPoint. A file emailed as a PPTX opens differently depending on the version, the platform and the fonts installed. Handouts need to print. And a deck sent to a client as a PDF cannot be edited by accident, or on purpose, which is occasionally the entire point.

What you gain is certainty: one slide to a page, in the deck's own aspect ratio, with the fonts embedded so it looks the same on every machine that opens it. Widescreen slides give you widescreen pages rather than being letterboxed onto A4, which is what most converters get wrong and what makes a printed handout look considered rather than improvised.

This is the part people do not think about until they see the result. A PDF page is static. Every animation, every build, every transition is gone, and each slide becomes a single picture of its final state.

If you built a slide where four bullet points appear one click at a time to keep an audience with you, the PDF shows all four at once. For a handout that is exactly right. For a deck somebody else is going to present from, it is a different document than the one you made.

Embedded media goes the same way. A PDF cannot play video or audio, so a slide containing either becomes a still of its poster frame. If the video is the substance of the slide rather than decoration, the PDF is not the format to send — the deck itself is.

Speaker notes are not included either. The PDF contains slides and nothing else. PowerPoint's own export can produce notes pages with the slide above and the notes below, and if that is what you need, that is the tool to use. This conversion produces the deck as an audience sees it.

A text box is a fixed shape, and if the replacement font is wider than the original the text can overflow it or shrink to fit — visible in a way that a reflowed paragraph in a Word document is not.

Our server carries metric-compatible replacements for the standard Microsoft fonts, which covers most decks exactly. A presentation built on a corporate typeface installed only on your machine is the case to look at afterwards, especially any slide where text was already a tight fit.

This conversion runs on our server, because reading a PowerPoint file properly means running an office suite. The file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, converted, and deleted as soon as the job finishes.

A deck built for a projector is built for a room. On a printed page the same slide is a quarter of the size and the twelve-point caption under the chart stops being legible — which is worth checking before sending a PDF to be printed rather than read on screen.

One slide to a page is what this conversion produces. If you want several slides on a sheet with room for notes, that is PowerPoint’s handout layout, and printing to PDF from there gives a better document than shrinking these pages afterwards.

A PowerPoint stores each image once even if a slide reuses it, and compresses the whole package as a ZIP. A PDF embeds the fonts it needs and describes every page independently, which adds a fixed overhead and removes some of that sharing.

For a deck of photographs the PDF is usually similar or smaller, because the images dominate. For a text-heavy deck built on a corporate typeface it can be noticeably larger, and font embedding is exactly why — that is also the thing making it render correctly on the machine you are sending it to.