How to Turn a PDF Into an Editable PowerPoint
Last year's pitch deck only survives as the PDF you emailed to a client. A colleague shared their lecture slides as a handout. Rebuilding thirty slides by hand takes an afternoon; converting the PDF gives you a PowerPoint file to edit in minutes.
Which PDFs convert well
PDFs that were exported from PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides in the first place convert best, because their pages already have slide proportions and their text is real text. Each PDF page becomes one slide.
Scanned handouts, photographed slides and PDFs printed several slides to a page convert as pictures: you get slides, but the text cannot be edited. Run OCR PDF first on a scan so its words become text, and expect to rebuild slides from multi-slide handout pages.
Convert the PDF
Open PDF to PowerPoint and add the file from your device, Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive, up to 260 MB. Choose PowerPoint (.pptx) at the top of the Convert to list and download the file, which keeps the PDF's name. It opens in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides.
If you only need a few slides from a long PDF, take those pages out first with Extract PDF Pages.
Fixing the slides
Check fonts first: if the original used a font you do not have, PowerPoint substitutes another, and lines may wrap differently. Select all text on a slide and apply your own font to make the deck consistent. Text that arrives as several separate boxes can be merged by copying it into one box. Charts usually come through as pictures; to edit the numbers, rebuild the chart in PowerPoint from the original data.
When a picture is enough
If you just want to show a page inside another presentation, not edit it, PDF to JPG gives you an image of the page to drop onto a slide. When the deck is finished, PowerPoint to PDF turns it back into a PDF to share.