Convert PowerPoint to a Word document, slide by slide

To convert PPT to Word, drop your .ppt or .pptx file on this page, leave Word version on DOCX (Word) and press Convert to DOCX. Every visible slide comes back as a page of an editable Word document, in the same order, and the file keeps the name of your deck: pitch.pptx downloads as pitch.docx.

Word cannot open a PowerPoint file, so the conversion runs in two steps, shown on the page as PPTX to PDF to DOCX. The deck is first saved as a PDF, one page per slide, and our server then rebuilds that PDF as a Word file: the words become paragraphs and table cells, and the pictures are placed again. That is why this PowerPoint to Word route is graded Very good rather than exact.

An older .ppt from PowerPoint 97 to 2003 goes in as it is, and in our test it gave the same Word file as the .pptx. For Word 2003, or a system that only takes .doc, pick DOC (Word 97) instead. That adds a third step, DOCX to DOC, and the page grades the longer route Good enough, so keep DOCX unless you need the old format.

We converted a widescreen test deck of five slides: a title with a bulleted list, a hidden slide, a slide with speaker notes, a table, and a picture beside a text box, with a shape set to appear on a click. The Word file came back like this:

• Four pages, one for each visible slide. Each page has the shape of the slide and no margins: 13.33 by 7.5 inches for a 16:9 deck, and 10 by 7.5 inches for an older 4:3 one.
• Titles, text boxes and table cells as Word text you can edit, with their size and bold kept.
• The table as a real Word table, every cell in place. The picture and its caption sat side by side in a table of two cells.
• Bullets as a typed • at the start of each line, not as a Word list.
• No hidden slide and no speaker notes. The shape set to appear on a click was simply on its page: animations and transitions do not carry over.

The Word file names the fonts our server drew the slides with, not your originals: Calibri came back as Carlito, and Aptos as Liberation Sans. Where your computer lacks one, Word shows a similar font instead, so lines can wrap a little differently.

A Word file is the right result when you want to rework the words of a deck. For other jobs, a different conversion does better:

• Convert PowerPoint to PDF to send or print the slides as they look in a slide show. The PDF keeps that layout fixed wherever it is opened.
• Convert PowerPoint to text for the words alone. In our test each slide's text came out in order, table cells one per line, again without the hidden slide or the notes.
• Convert PowerPoint to PPTX to bring an old .ppt into the current format and keep it as slides. That saves the deck itself, so every slide and its speaker notes stay.
• Convert Word to PowerPoint for the opposite trip: each page of a document becomes a slide, with its text in boxes you can edit.

Only have the slides as a PDF? PDF to Word rebuilds it in one step, the second half of the route above. And for a document that never was a deck, convert HTML to Word or convert text to Word: both make a DOCX in a single step, graded Exact.