Convert PowerPoint to text: your slides' words in one file

To convert PPT to text, press Select PowerPoint file or drop a .pptx or .ppt anywhere on this page, then press Convert to TXT. There is nothing to set. You get one plain .txt file named after the deck, so pitch.pptx comes back as pitch.txt, with the words of each visible slide in slide order.

The page shows the route as PPTX to PDF to TXT. Our server first saves the deck as a PDF, one page per slide, then lifts the words off each page. That second step shapes the file, which is why this PowerPoint to text route is graded Words only. From our seven-slide test deck:

• After each slide comes a page-break character (a form feed), which marks where one slide ends and the next begins.
• Bullets arrive as a • at the start of the line. A paragraph that wrapped on the slide comes back as several lines, broken where the slide broke it.
• A table gives one cell per line, row by row, with a blank line between cells.
• Words on the slide master, such as a school name in a corner, repeat once for every slide.
• The file is UTF-8 with plain line feeds. Accents, £ and €, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and an emoji all came through.

Only words typed into titles, text boxes and tables are lifted. Text set to appear on a click is included, since the PDF shows every slide complete. These parts of our test deck did not reach the .txt file:

• Speaker notes. The PDF step saves what your audience sees, and notes are not part of it.
• Hidden slides. Unhide one in PowerPoint before you convert if you need its words.
• Words that are part of a picture, such as a photo of a poster or a screenshot. The caption in a text box beside it came through.
• Fonts, sizes, colours, the pictures themselves and the layout of each slide.

Within a slide, text is read by where it sits, not by the order it was added. A box at the top came out before one at the bottom, even though the bottom one was made first, and of two boxes side by side, the left came out before the right.

Some decks hold no typed text at all: every slide is a picture, as in a scanned handout or slides exported as images. When a deck has no text to lift, the words in its pictures are read first and go into the .txt file. Only English is read, and a letter can be misread: in our test of two picture-only slides every line came back, but Scanned was read as ocanned.

A deck that mixes typed text with pictures is not read this way, so the words inside its pictures stay out. An old .ppt from PowerPoint 97 to 2003 goes in as it is, and in our test it gave exactly the same text as the .pptx. To keep working on such a deck as slides, convert PowerPoint to PPTX: one step, graded Exact, with every slide and the speaker notes kept.

Plain text suits pasting into an email, a translation tool, a search index or a script that reads line by line. When you need more than the words, another conversion fits better:

• Convert PowerPoint to Word for the words with their size and bold kept, a page per slide, ready to edit.
• Convert PowerPoint to ODT for a document in LibreOffice Writer's format. It goes through a PDF and a Word file, three steps, so the route is graded Good enough.
• Convert PowerPoint to PDF to keep the full look of the slides for sending or printing.
• PDF to Text, when you only have the slides as a PDF: it lifts the words in one step.

Going the other way, convert text to PowerPoint to turn a .txt file into slides, or convert HTML to text to strip a saved web page down to its words.