Converting pdf files to powerpoint

vorbis

A manager at work has a bunch of pdf pages as slides for a presentation. For reasons presumably known only to her. She wants to convert them to powerpoint format. Does anyone know of an application / method to do this? Copying images of the pages is not enough. Is there actually a way to convert them into editable powerpoint slides with the formatting intact (colours, layout etc.) Thanks for any help.

Seth Brundle

pdf to word (some may be of help)
There seems to be loads on Google - you decide on the best.

vorbis

i tried using google but they all sem to be one way i.e. from ppt to pdf

Seth Brundle

did you click the google link I posted above? There are plenty of results for you there!

Syth

Have you tried OpenOffice.org? Their presentation programme (called Impress) can import PowerPoint stuff (AFAIK) and can export PDF. That might work for you. I'm not entirly sure though as I haven't used it much. I'm trying to learn how to use it though because it can export to Macromedia Flash files, which is a toy I wanna play with!

Seth Brundle

IIRC openoffice doesn't convert pdf to ppt

Syth

IIRC openoffice doesn't convert pdf to ppt

Yeah, it's probably a lot easier to do it the other way.

Course you could just print them out then, scan them in as images. Speaking of which I'm sure there is a way to convert PDF pages to images. Or just press Print Screen on each page. Though that'd be a pain in the ass.

fragile

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~sontag/pdf2ppt.txt

ressem

Chances of getting it perfect are slim, depends on doc.

Another intermediate method.

pdf 2 html
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_simple_form.html

and import html. to ppt.
Assuming that this tool doesn't use images again, never tried it.

Or buy Acrobat.

FYI: followup posts, you can use ghostview to automate pdf to image conversion.

RicardoSmith

vorbis wrote:

A manager at work has a bunch of pdf pages as slides for a presentation. For reasons presumably known only to her. She wants to convert them to powerpoint format. Does anyone know of an application / method to do this? Copying images of the pages is not enough. Is there actually a way to convert them into editable powerpoint slides with the formatting intact (colours, layout etc.) Thanks for any help.

The only way to bring them into Powerpoint is to export them from Acrobat and rebuild them in Powerpoint. Shouldn't be that big a deal unless you have an awful lot of them.

You could automate the process by exporting them into Word, and then using VBA to rebuild them in Powerpoint. You can even script Acrobat. But you'd need to be doing an awful lot of them for that to be any advantage over doing it manually.

Maybe all she needs is to show a slide show of the PDF's? In which case look for an slide show/image browser that can handle PDF's. Though maybe you'd be better scripting Acrobat to display each PDF as a slideshow.

cravian

Is there any way you can print from Acrobat to a file using postscript, then import the postscript into Powerpoint? I seem to remember someone doing this (or something similar) - at least the illustrations would be preserved.

As an aside there are quite a few freeware utilities [google] to extract images from PDF files if the text is minimal...

Seth Brundle

I can still find software solutions to this through Google. Am I the only one?

Hobbes

Why is it in PDF to begin with?