Converting a PPTX into a DOCX

November 20, 2008 8:58 AM

How do I convert a PowerPoint presentation to a Word document? (Office 2007 on Windows XP)

I have a 63-slide PPT that my boss has decreed should really be a Word document. It's going to be inserted into yet another Word document as a chapter of a big honking manual. I can extract some of the text by saving it as an Outline/RTF, but that doesn't extract the text within text boxes, and I have to reformat all of the text anyway. The most frustrating thing is that there are screenshots on almost every slide, and the only way I've been able to do this is in the past is to cut and paste every one of them.

IIRC, Office 2003 used to be able to do this conversion (albeit sloppily). Unfortunately, I don't have access to it. How can I go about this? The end result needs to be accessible to and editable by people who are not, shall we say, technologically adept.

posted by desjardins to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Will this do what you need?

I have 2003, and indeed it has a "Send to Word" command. It looks like 2007 handles it differently, but I've never tried it.

Coincidentally, I am working on the exact same kind of project right now.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:27 AM on November 20, 2008

Unfortunately no, Fuzzy Skinner, because the only options for handouts are to show the slides or the outline. If I choose the slides, I can't edit them in Word. If I choose the outline, all I get is the text of the headers of each slide, and no images or text boxes.
posted by desjardins at 9:35 AM on November 20, 2008

If you do choose the "Send to Word" and choose the slides option, you can double click on the slides in Word and edit them. However, they're small, and they look like pictures, and I'm guessing you want something that actually takes the whole slide and converts it into a page, yes?

My boss is out of town and I will be working on your problem all day, because now it's driving me crazy. We WILL solve this.
posted by Evangeline at 9:44 AM on November 20, 2008

Here's my resolution to my particular situation, but MS really needs to fix this.

Cutting and pasting the images and text boxes into Word renders them uneditable anyway. New text boxes would have to be recreated for each page, if one later wants to edit the text. And, you know, screw them. They can go edit the original PPT.

THEREFORE, the slides might as well all be jpegs. I am going to export them from PPT as such and slap them into Word. Done. For future reference:

1. In PPT, "Save as.." JPEG. Choose all slides. They'll automatically save to their own folder with the PPT file name.
2. In Word: on the insert menu, click on picture. Navigate to folder, CTRL+A, "open," done.
posted by desjardins at 11:27 AM on November 20, 2008

I do this with hundreds of slides each year for event portfolios. While you can export the slides to jpeg and manually insert into Word, like you decided to do, the Word file size grows really quickly that way, and the quality of the final printout isn't all that great. I've found, through trial and error, that the best quality printed output comes from just manually copying and pasting the slides from PP into the Word document.

Open PP, select a slide, CTRL+C, tab to the Word document, select "Paste Special" from the edit menu (or create a keyboard shortcut for it), paste it as "Picture" [the help text for which says "Inserts the contents of the Clipboard as a picture. This format is better than Bitmap for printing to high quality printers. Of the format options available, Picture occupies the least space on disk and displays the quickest in Word."]. Now it's a plain graphic inserted into the Word document, and you can work with it from there - including resizing, etc.

While it can be tedious and time consuming to do it that way, it is actually easier (IMHO) than the "export to Word" feature, as the "export" feature produces a Word doc that includes a bunch of extraneous spaces/paragraphs/page breaks, etc.
posted by gemmy at 12:37 PM on November 20, 2008