How to convert a PDF document into Powerpoint slides

We want to convert PDF to Powerpoint slides

But there is no direct way to convert between the two formats. So let's break it down into an intermediary step: convert each page in the PDF document into JPG, then import the JPGs into Powerpoint.

Convert PDF to JPG using Ghostscript

Ghostscript is the bet tool for converting from PDF or PS into other formats. ImageMagick is the more popular tool, but for PDF conversion it uses Ghostscript in the background.


Before conversion, you need to know a couple of things:

• The actual density or dpi for the PDF document
• Quality vs size for the generated image

This StackOverflow answer, especially the top voted comment has a good explanation on  density and quality. Here is a straightforward Ghostscript command for the conversion assuming 200dpi and 100% JPEG quality:

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=jpeg -r200 -dJPEGQ=100 -sOutputFile=document-%02d.jpg "The_Artificial_Intelligence_Crush_2018.pdf" -dBATCH

I wrote about ImageMagick image quality when converting from PDF.

Convert PDF to JPG using ImageMagick

 Use ImageMagick (with Ghostscript installed) for a more user-friendly format, especially for tuning the quality

magick -density 200 -colorspace sRGB "The_Artificial_Intelligence_Crush_2018.pdf" -flatten output-%02d.jpg

Use convert instead of magick on Linux and macOS.

Import Images Into Powerpoint

Now that you have the images ready, let's open a new Presentation in Powerpoint, and Insert → Photo Album

Select all the images and click Create

Tada! Your PDF document is now a Powerpoint presentation.

How About macOS?

If you are using macOS, there is good news and bad news. The good news is exporting images from PDF is a breeze using Preview. View Thumbnails in Preview, or press ⌘ + ⌥ + 1. Then select all the images and File → Export. The Preview User Guide has a section titled Extract a PDF page as an image.

The bad news is Powerpoint for Mac still does not have the Insert Photo Album functionality. You can either use Automator, or create the slides in Keynote, then export to PPT.