Did you receive a PDF from someone that needs to be converted into a PowerPoint presentation? Or did you lose the original PowerPoint file, and only have a PDF version left? Maybe you received an InDesign or Quark file that needs to do double-duty as a PowerPoint deck? Or there may be any number of reasons to create an editable PowerPoint slide deck from a PDF.
Products that create PowerPoint presentations from PDFs are aplenty, and Adobe’s own Acrobat Pro XI or a newer version can do the trick. But when you need something more than just basic conversion, you can look at PDFelement 6 Pro. What’s so special about PDFelement 6 Pro? To start with, did you know that if your PDF has scanned pictures of text, other products will retain the picture as it is within the converted PowerPoint file. But PDFelement 6 Pro can also convert the text within a picture into editable text so that you don’t have to type it all over again!
Walkthrough
Follow these steps to see a quick walkthrough of using PDFelement 6 Pro to convert a PDF into an editable PowerPoint file:
- Open an existing PDF that you want to convert to a PowerPoint presentation within PDFelement 6 Pro, as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: PDF opened in PDFelement 6 Pro- We now changed the view in PDFelement 6 Pro. Did you know that you have access to more than ten viewing options, all available via the View tab of the Ribbon? We chose to view multiple pages and found that our PDF has three pages, as shown in Figure 2, below. After conversion, these PDF pages will result in three PowerPoint slides.
Figure 2: Multiple Pages View in PDFelement 6 Pro- Let us now take stock of what we have here. Our first PDF page has nothing but text. Our second page has some text, plus a screenshot. The screenshot has some text in the form of button names and menu options. The third page has a title and a picture, which again contains text. Do note that ordinarily, you would not consider the screenshot or the picture to be a source of text, and that’s OK because, in our first attempt, we will try to create a simple PowerPoint presentation from this PDF.
- To create a simple PowerPoint file, access the Home tab of the Ribbon, and click the To Others button to bring up the dropdown list shown in Figure 3, below.
Figure 3: Convert to PowerPoint- Just beside the To Others button is the To Word button that converts your PDFs into editable Word documents! Also, within the To Others dropdown list, you will find many output options, including Excel, Text, EPUB, HTML, etc. We chose the Convert to PowerPoint option.
- This summons the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 4. We chose a location to accept all defaults to convert the PDF to a PowerPoint file.
Figure 4: PDFelement 6 Pro Save As- Soon, you are shown a message box that says “Conversion completed,” as shown in Figure 5, below.
Figure 5: PDFelement 6 Pro Conversion Completed- We opened the converted file in PowerPoint, and all text and images were recognized. In fact, PDFelement 6 Pro also identified bullet characters, as you can see in Figure 6, below. Do note though that placeholders turn into individual text boxes. This is not a deal-breaker, but it is important that you are aware of this fact.
Figure 6: Editable Text and Bullets- Also, no text that was part of pictures or screenshots is converted to editable text yet. And that’s exactly what you want to happen with conventional slides. But what if you want to recover text from some images, screenshots, or even tables which are not editable tables but pictures that your clients scanned from an old industry journal? PDFelement 6 Pro can recognize such text, saving you from hours of typing!
- This time bring up the same Save As dialog box that we saw in Figure 4 but click the Settings button rather than the Save button.
- You will see the PowerPoint Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 7, below. Choose the All Files option rather than the default Only scanned PDF option, and click OK. If you want this to be the default setting, you can also choose the Default button, but we strongly suggest you don’t choose this option unless none of your pictures has any text!
Figure 7: PowerPoint Settings- As you can see in Figure 8, below, the resultant PowerPoint has all the text you need. The text may not look beautiful, and that’s because while PDFelement 6 Pro can recognize the text characters, it cannot recognize the original font used, or you may not have the same font available on your system. Fortunately, and that’s a big plus, you are saved from hours of typing!
Figure 8: Recognized text
Conclusion
So as you can see, PDFelement 6 Pro is a useful addition to your software collection, and it has many features that we have not even covered in this review. PDFelement 6 Pro is a complete PDF solution that edit, creates, converts, signs, OCRs, protects, and so on. Plus, the Pro version has the powerful batch process option that lets you automatically extract data in PDF forms. Additionally, the new PDFelement 6 for iOS is available for free now.
PDFelement 6 Pro costs $99.95, and the Standard edition costs $59.95. Volume licensing options are also available. At this price point, PDFelement 6 Pro provides a fabulous price: performance ratio as far as your RoI is concerned. Support is available via email and an online forum.