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Desktop app

PPT to PDF converter

Coming to the PDFCheetah desktop app

Turn a PowerPoint presentation into a PDF, in the PDFCheetah desktop app.

What it will do

PPT to PDF will open a PowerPoint presentation (.pptx or .ppt) and save it as a PDF with one page per slide, keeping the fonts, layouts, pictures and charts as they appear in PowerPoint.

PPT to PDF covers .pptx, which every recent version of PowerPoint saves, and the older binary .ppt, which PowerPoint still opens in Compatibility Mode. Either way, a PDF is a still page for each slide: animations and transitions do not play in it, and embedded videos and sounds do not come with it. Each slide comes out with everything on it showing at once.

It will run in the PDFCheetah desktop app, on your own computer, with nothing uploaded.

Why it needs the desktop app

A slide is drawn by the program that opens it: its fonts, its layout, its shapes and charts. Drawing it faithfully takes a full office engine.

The engine the desktop app will carry, LibreOffice, is far too large to download into a browser tab every time you open a page. The app installs it once and converts on your computer.

Save it as a PDF today

PowerPoint, Google Slides, LibreOffice and Keynote can all save a presentation as a PDF. Here is how, step by step.

  • Image to PDF. If you have the slides as pictures, PDFCheetah puts them into one PDF in your browser today.

Microsoft PowerPoint

  1. Open the file in PowerPoint.
  2. Choose File, then Save As (Save a Copy in some versions).
  3. Set the file type, or File Format on a Mac, to PDF.
  4. On Windows, Options lets you save handouts or notes pages instead of one slide per page.
  5. Choose Save, or Export on a Mac.

Google Slides

  1. Upload the file to Google Drive and open it with Google Slides.
  2. Choose File, then Download, then PDF Document (.pdf).

This way uploads your file to Google Drive. The others on this page work on your own computer.

LibreOffice Impress (free, works offline)

  1. Open the file in LibreOffice Impress.
  2. Choose File, then Export As, then Export as PDF.
  3. Pick the pages and the image quality you want, then choose Export.

Keynote on a Mac

  1. Open the file in Keynote, which reads Microsoft Office files.
  2. Choose File, then Export To, then PDF.
  3. Choose whether to include presenter notes and skipped slides.
  4. Choose Next, name the PDF, then choose Export.

Any program that can print

  1. Open the file and choose Print.
  2. On Windows, pick Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. On a Mac, open the PDF menu at the bottom of the print window and choose Save as PDF.
  3. Choose Print or Save, and pick where the PDF goes.

Printing to PDF keeps what is on the page, but links and the document's headings are usually lost.

Nothing on this page converts a file today. PDFCheetah's web tools turn text, Markdown, CSV and pictures into PDFs in your browser, but not Office documents.

The desktop app

The PDFCheetah desktop app is being built for Windows, macOS and Linux, to do the work a browser tab cannot, on your own computer. Its download page goes up when the app is published.

One email, when this tool is ready in the desktop app. No newsletter, and we do not pass it on.

Common questions

Is PPT to PDF free?
The ways to save a presentation as a PDF on this page are free today. In the desktop app, Office to PDF is planned as part of Pro, which has no price yet, so there is nothing to buy here.
Is my file uploaded?
No. Nothing on this page takes a file. The desktop app will convert on your own computer, the way every PDFCheetah tool works in your browser. Of the ways above, only Google's apps upload your file, to Google Drive.
When will it be ready?
There is no date yet. Leave your email above and we will send one message when it is ready in the desktop app.