I’m looking for a way to easily convert a PDF into a Powerpoint. I know it’s probably not feasible to get all the animations, individual object, whatnot back, but what I want is really simple. In fact, it’s so simple, I just did it, but it took forever my way, so I’m hoping for something quicker.
I have a PDF that was made from a PPT file, so each page is exactly the same size as a slide. What I did was take the snapshot tool (I think that’s what it’s called - it’s the one with a camera icon) and basically copy each page individually to the clipboard and then paste it into a blank Powerpoint slide. Is there a faster way to do this? Can I somehow just convert all the pages into jpegs or something so I can just pop those into Powerpoint? Extra points if it can be made into a pic that’s exactly the size of the blank slide too. I’m not holding out much hope for that one, but any automation would make this that much easier.
I have the free Acrobat reader, no access to the full Adobe and I don’t like to pirate software so it’s not likely I’ll get it anytime soon, and Foxit Reader.
There is likely a way, but it probably requires access to the full version of Acrobat, not just the reader. Double checking now…
How much are you willing to spend?
This page gives a variety of free workaround methods, one being the one you’ve used. They’re all troublesome or time consuming.
PDF2Office is $59.00. That’s the cheapest I can find.
Yeah, unfortunately that first link you provided is the same one I found earlier. It seems like it should be a fairly easy process, and I have this nagging feeling that I’ve done this before, but I can’t remember how. Thanks for the help so far!
If you’re willing to use command-line tools, you can use pdftoppm (available for Linux-like systems, including Cygwin) to convert the PDF file to a set of PPM image files, one per page. From there you can use tools like ImageMagick’s convert to crop to PowerPoint’s 4:3 aspect ratio, if needed, and convert to a format that PowerPoint can read (PNG is probably good if the PDF contains a lot of cartoony line drawings; JPG only if the original images are more like photographs).
If you have to do this several times, it should be fairly easy to build all of this into a batch command in your favorite scripting language, to create N image files from an N-page PDF with a single command.
pdftk may also be useful, for extracting individual pages of the PDF into single-page files; and pdfimages can extract embedded images with no further losses (if you want not the entire PDF page but just some of the included images).
In case anybody else is interested in this, I sort of solved my problem. GSview is a great freeware tool for .ps, .pdf files, and more. I can easily export all the pages as .jpgs or whatever I want. I knew I had done this before!