Turn PDF pages into slides for a deck

Read this before you run it: what comes back is a set of PNG pictures, one per page, and an index.html that shows them in order. It is not a .pptx file and the slides are not editable — a PDF has no notion of a slide, a title placeholder or a build, so there is nothing to convert into one. What the pictures are good for is building a deck in one step, and for showing the pages exactly as they are.

It does not write .pptx files. What comes back is one PNG per page and an index page; you assemble the deck from those, which takes one step in PowerPoint and Keynote alike.

Make slide pictures

No account. Your upload is deleted after 2 hours, the result after 24 hours.

How it works

  1. Choose the pages and the resolution. 150 dpi looks right on a projector and on a screen. Up to 500 pages in one run; a range keeps the deck to the pages you will actually put up.
  2. Download and open the index. One zip: a PNG per page, numbered so they sort in order, plus index.html. Open the index in a browser to check the order — each slide is captioned with the page it came from.
  3. Build the deck. In PowerPoint, Insert, Photo Album, File/Disk and select every PNG at once. In Keynote or Google Slides, drag them onto blank slides. Set the slide size to the shape of the pages first, or every slide gets bars down the sides.

What the options do

The form above lists the options this tool is running today, straight from the server. This is what they are for.

Resolution (dots per inch)
150 is right for a projector and for a screen, and there is nothing to gain by going higher unless you will zoom into a slide while you talk. The ceiling here is 300 rather than the 400 the image converter allows, because a deck is 40 pictures rather than one. A page large enough to exceed about 50 megapixels at your setting is refused with a message asking for a lower resolution.
Pages to convert
Which pages become slides, up to 500 in one run. A 300-page report is not a deck: pick the pages you will show. The index page captions each slide with its original page number, so you can always tell where one came from once they are out of order.

What this tool does not do

  • It does not write .pptx files. What comes back is one PNG per page and an index page; you assemble the deck from those, which takes one step in PowerPoint and Keynote alike.
  • Every slide is a picture, so nothing on it can be edited, selected, searched or read aloud — a deck of page images is not accessible to a screen reader. Keep the PDF if the audience needs the text.
  • Page shape is not changed. A portrait A4 page on a 16:9 slide has wide bars either side; set the slide size to match the pages, or crop the pages first.
  • There are no titles, speaker notes, transitions or builds to carry over. A PDF does not have them, so nothing can invent them.
  • 500 pages at a time, and 300 dpi at the most.

What happens to your file

The file is uploaded because PDF to PowerPoint runs on our server rather than in the browser tab. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the result you download for 24 hours, then a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

Nothing about the contents is logged, and no one reads your documents. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

Will I get an editable .pptx?
No. You get one PNG per page and an index.html that shows them in order. A PDF holds no slide structure — no titles, no placeholders, no builds — so there is nothing to rebuild a presentation from, and renaming a folder of pictures .pptx would not change that.
How do I get these into PowerPoint quickly?
Insert, Photo Album, File/Disk, select every PNG at once and choose ‘Fit to slide’. That builds the whole deck in one step. Set the slide size to match the shape of the pages before you do it, or you will be fixing 40 slides afterwards.
My slides have white bars down the sides.
The pages are portrait and the slide is 16:9. Change the slide size to match the pages — A4 portrait, or 4:3 — or crop the pages first if it is the margins rather than the shape that are the problem.
Could I just present the PDF instead?
Often, and it is usually the better answer: most readers have a full-screen mode that behaves like a presenter view. Convert to pictures when you need to mix the pages with slides of your own, or when the venue only accepts a deck.
Why PNG rather than JPEG?
Because a page is mostly type and rules, which is where JPEG’s compression shows as haloes around the letters — visible on a projector three metres wide. If file size matters more than that, PDF to JPG will give you JPEGs at a quality you choose.