Convert Word to PowerPoint

To convert Word to PowerPoint, select or drop your .docx or .doc, leave PowerPoint version on PPTX and press Convert to PPTX. Each page of the document becomes one slide that looks like that page: your headings do not turn into slide titles, and your paragraphs do not turn into bullet points.

We tried it on a two-page A4 report with headings, a bulleted list, a chart, a table and a header. It came back as two slides in the same order, and the deck kept the report's name: plan-a4.docx came back as plan-a4.pptx. On each slide:

• Every line of text is its own text box, where it sat on the page, with its size, bold, italic and colour.
• Pictures, charts, shading and table borders sit behind the text as pictures, copied at 150 dots per inch, so a sharp photo can look softer than it did in Word.
• A table is not a PowerPoint table: its borders are a picture, and each cell's text is a separate box on top.
• The slide takes the shape of the first page. Our A4 report gave tall A4 slides, not widescreen ones, and a landscape US Letter page gave a landscape slide of 11 by 8.5 inches.

This Word to PPT converter copies the look of each page. It does not build a talk from your outline. Every slide uses the blank layout, so there is no title box for a heading to go into. The bullets stay where they were, but each bullet mark is a small box of its own beside its line, not a PowerPoint list. A header that runs along the top of every Word page shows on every slide as plain text.

That suits a report, a handout or a poster you want to show full screen. If you want a presentation built from your headings, one point per slide, you will lay out those slides yourself, and it is quicker to copy from the Word file, where each paragraph is still whole. For a program that cannot open .docx, convert Word to RTF first: in our test it kept the paragraphs whole, the table and the chart.

Under PowerPoint version, PPTX (PowerPoint) is picked for you, and the page suggests PPT (PowerPoint 97) only for software from before 2007. To convert Word to PPT, the old format, the finished PPTX is saved once more, so the route grows by a step and the grade drops:

If you are unsure what the other person can open, our guide on which deck format to send compares PPTX, PPT and PDF. Already made a PPTX here and then asked for the old format? Convert PPTX to PPT in one step instead of starting again from the Word file.

A Word document has no fixed pages until it is laid out. So the first step lays it out as it would print and saves a PDF, and the second rebuilds each PDF page as a slide, with the words in boxes and the rest as pictures. That is why the page shows DOCX to PDF to PPTX, graded Very good, with a warning that the odd margin, font or line break may move.

Fonts change on the way. Microsoft's fonts are not on our server, so the first step draws Calibri and Cambria with stand-ins of the same width, and the slides then name Arial for that text. In our test, Calibri, Cambria and Aptos all came back as Arial, so Cambria lost its serifs, while Times New Roman and Arial kept their names. The boxes do not re-wrap, and our longest Calibri line ran a little past the right margin, though it stayed on the slide.

Have the document as a PDF already? Turn a PDF into slides and skip the first step. A web page takes the same two-step route when you convert HTML to PowerPoint. And to go the other way, turn slides back into a Word document, one page per slide.