You spend hours making your slides look right, then send the file and the other person sees a different font, a shifted picture, or a message that they can’t open .pptx files at all. Saving your presentation as a PDF avoids almost all of these problems.

Why send a PDF instead of a PowerPoint file?

  • It looks the same everywhere. A PDF fixes the layout, so it appears the same on phones, tablets and computers.
  • Anyone can open it. Every phone and computer can open a PDF without PowerPoint.
  • It’s harder to change by accident. Useful for handouts, submitted assignments and proposals.
  • It’s often smaller, which helps with email size limits.

Send the .pptx file only when the other person needs to edit or present it with animations.

Converting with Convertpdfly

  1. Open PowerPoint to PDF and add your .pptx file.
  2. Choose whether to include hidden slides.
  3. Click Convert and download the PDF. Each slide becomes one page of the same shape as your slides.

The converter keeps text with its size, color and alignment, bullet points, pictures, shapes, tables, slide backgrounds and the design from your slide master. It runs in your browser, so confidential decks aren’t uploaded.

Prepare your deck so nothing goes missing

Charts and SmartArt

Convertpdfly doesn’t draw charts, SmartArt or embedded videos yet. If your deck has them, turn each one into a picture first: in PowerPoint, right-click the chart, choose Copy, then Paste Special as a picture (PNG), and delete the original. Pictures always come through.

Animations

A PDF can’t animate. If a slide builds up step by step, the PDF shows the final state with everything visible. Check that animated items don’t sit on top of each other when all are shown.

Fonts

The PDF uses standard fonts, so text in unusual fonts may wrap slightly differently. Leave a little space at the end of text boxes rather than filling them to the edge.

Old .ppt files

Files from PowerPoint 2003 or earlier use the .ppt format. Open them in PowerPoint, Google Slides or LibreOffice Impress, save as .pptx, then convert.

Speaker notes

Notes aren’t included in the PDF. If your audience needs them, add the key points to the slides or send a separate document.

Making the PDF smaller

Presentations with many large photos can produce big PDFs. If yours is too large to email, run it through Compress PDF. Compression turns pages into optimized images, so choose “Light” or “Recommended” to keep text sharp. Better still, compress large photos before inserting them into slides, with Compress Image.

Handouts and combining files

Want to send slides together with a report or an agenda? Convert each to PDF and join them with Merge PDF. To number the pages of the combined document, use Add Page Numbers.

Need to edit a PDF presentation?

If you only have the PDF version of a deck, PDF to PowerPoint turns it back into slides, with text you can edit placed on top of each page’s background.