Convert PowerPoint to GIF, every slide on a loop

To turn PowerPoint to GIF, select or drop your .pptx or .ppt file, keep Animated GIF of all slides, choose a Time per slide and press Convert to GIF. You get one GIF named after your deck, so pitch.pptx comes back as pitch.gif. Every slide is a frame, in order, and the GIF plays on a loop by itself. That suits a short deck you want to show where a PowerPoint file cannot play: a social post, a chat, an email or a web page.

Our test deck had five slides, one of them hidden, and came back as a GIF of four frames:

• Hidden slides are left out, so only what a slide show displays becomes a frame.
• Speaker notes stay out of every frame.
• Text and shapes set to appear on a click are already in place in their slide's frame.
• A deck with a single slide gives a still GIF, and the result says so.

Prefer one picture? Slide 1 only gives a still GIF of the first slide, at 96, 150 or 300 DPI. Behind the button, our server saves the deck as a PDF and draws each page, then your browser joins those pages into the GIF on your own device. Have the deck only as a PDF? PDF to GIF offers the same choices.

Time per slide sets how long each slide stays on screen: half a second, 1, 2, 3 or 5 seconds, with 2 seconds picked for you. Every slide gets the same time. Two seconds is enough for a title or a picture; give slides with a paragraph to read 3 or 5 seconds. After the last slide the GIF starts again from the first, without end.

An older 4:3 slide is 960 × 720 pixels at 96 DPI. Photos are what make the file heavy: our deck of 100 plain text slides came to 459 KB at 96 DPI, about the same as the four slides with one photo among them.

Each frame gets its own set of up to 256 colours, so a slide of bright charts does not have to share colours with a slide of photos. Text, shapes and flat colour come out clean. Photos and gradients show bands of colour, because 256 is not many; PowerPoint to PNG and PowerPoint to JPG keep full colour when you need sharp stills.

This PPT to GIF converter keeps each slide at full width, gives every slide the same time and loops the GIF forever. For a narrower GIF, one that plays once or 3 times, or faster frames, build it from pictures of your slides instead:

1. Convert PowerPoint to PNG and unzip the download. It holds one PNG for each slide, numbered in order: pitch-p001.png, pitch-p002.png and so on.
2. Open Images to GIF, select all the PNGs and check they sit in number order. Drag a card to move one.
3. Set the Time per frame (0.1 to 3 seconds), the Repeat (Forever, Once or 3 times) and the Width (320 to 800 pixels), then press Make GIF.

We tried this with our four-slide test deck. At 640 pixels wide, 2 seconds a frame and Repeat set to Once, the GIF came to 113 KB, against 414 KB for the full-width GIF from this page. Images to GIF works in your browser, so the PNGs are not uploaded again, and it does not count towards the three free conversions a day.

For each slide as a picture of its own rather than an animation, convert PowerPoint to WebP: a ZIP of small files that suit web pages, 307 KB for our four test slides at 150 DPI. Or convert PowerPoint to TIFF to get every slide in one multi-page TIFF, at 300 DPI unless you pick less.

A plain .txt or .html file works differently: convert text to GIF or convert HTML to GIF lays it out on A4 pages and gives one still GIF per page, not an animation.

To bring a GIF back into a deck, convert GIF to PowerPoint. Our four-frame GIF from this page came back as a deck of four slides, rebuilt from the pictures, so keep your original .pptx for real edits.