How do I convert a PowerPoint to PDF without PowerPoint installed?

Someone sends you a deck and asks for it back as a PDF. Or a course portal only accepts PDFs, and your presentation is a .pptx. You are on a Chromebook, a borrowed laptop, a work machine without Office, or your phone.

You do not need PowerPoint for this. The conversion can happen on a server that has a full office converter installed.

Step by step

1. Open PowerPoint to PDF in any browser.
2. Tap or click Choose File and pick the presentation. It accepts .pptx, .ppt and .odp (the OpenDocument format LibreOffice Impress saves).
3. Under Page setup, leave Page size and Orientation on Auto unless you are printing. See the next section.
4. Press Create PDF.
5. Press Download PDF. The file has the same name as the presentation, ending in .pdf.

The deck is converted on our server, and the file is deleted as soon as the PDF is built. There is no account to create.

Auto, or a paper size?

Auto keeps each slide at its own dimensions. A widescreen deck gives widescreen pages, one slide each, which is right for reading on screen, projecting and emailing.

Choose A4, Letter, Legal or A3 only if the PDF is going to be printed on that paper. Each slide is then scaled to fit the sheet and centred on it. The text stays real text; it is not turned into a picture. Orientation can be set to Portrait or Landscape as well. A widescreen slide on a portrait sheet leaves a lot of white space above and below it.

Speaker notes are not included

The PDF contains the slides only. Presenter notes are not exported, and there is no option to add them.

If you need the notes as a PDF:

• If you can reach PowerPoint anywhere, including on another computer, printing with the Notes Pages layout to a PDF printer puts each slide above its notes.
• The free LibreOffice Impress desktop app can open the deck and export a PDF with notes pages; the option is in its PDF export settings.
• Without either, copy the notes into a document, convert that with Word to PDF, and send the two PDFs together, or combine them with Merge PDF.

What happens to the fonts

This is the part worth checking before you send the file.

A .pptx does not contain its fonts. It names them and expects the computer opening it to have them. A server without Office does not have Microsoft's fonts, so it uses stand-ins:

• Calibri and Cambria are replaced by Carlito and Caladea, which are designed to take up exactly the same space, letter for letter.
• Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New are replaced by the matching Liberation fonts, which do the same.

For decks set in those fonts, lines break where they always did. Anything else, such as newer Office fonts, brand typefaces or decorative display fonts, is replaced by something that may be wider or narrower, and a heading that fitted on one line can wrap onto two.

What does not come across

• Animations and transitions. Each slide appears in its finished state, with every build step visible at once.
• Video and audio. A PDF page cannot play them. At most, a still frame appears where the player was.
• Handouts with several slides per page. Convert first, then use SmartShrink to put two or four slides on each sheet.

Password-protected or damaged decks

A presentation protected with a password, or a damaged file, cannot be converted. The tool says so rather than producing a broken PDF. Remove the password in the app that set it, or ask the sender for an unprotected copy.

If the PDF is too large

Photo-heavy decks produce large PDFs. Compress PDF usually takes a great deal off an image-heavy deck without touching the text.