The ultimate guide: converting your presentation to PDF — Slidepresso

You prepared your presentation slides meticulously, reviewed them a few times and everything is ready to go. If you are presenting in person or online, you have your slides saved on your computer or in the cloud and you are rehearsing your speech.

The last step of your preparation process is to finalise your slides. In most cases, it will involve creating a PDF version.

Don’t skip it and don’t leave it for after your presentation!

Your presentation will probably last a maximum of 30 or 60 minutes. However, the material you share with your audience may be used for months or years after your presentation. It may be shared online, emailed to people who didn’t see you presenting etc. Don’t miss the opportunity to leave a long-lasting impression. Create trust, confidence and influence decisions, by having a perfect slide deck for your presentation.

When to use a PDF version of your presentation?

Creating backup

Create a PDF version of your slides before the presentation and keep it as an ultimate backup during your presentation.

It’s unlikely to be needed, but the presentation software can crash or suddenly refuse to read your presentation file. If you are using someone else’s computer to deliver your presentation, you always risk discovering incompatibilities between different versions of the same programme or another bad surprise. And if you are using online presentation software, you may suddenly have issues connecting to it.

Sharing your presentation

In most cases PDF would be the best format to share your presentation with anyone else:

• sending your slides to your audience after the presentation,
• publish them on the website, in the company intranet or presentation library,
• send to someone who didn’t attend the presentation.

Getting feedback

If you are invited to speak at a conference or at a meeting hosted by someone else, you will usually have to share your slides in advance with the organisers. When working on your presentation, you may want to send your draft to someone. A colleague, teacher, manager or expert can give you useful feedback and comments. Or you have to share it with someone who needs to validate your material before being presented.

Using PDF format to gather feedbacks allows readers to add comments directly to the PDF file. It may take a bit longer to go review all the comments and make changes in your master file, but you don’t want to have other people making direct changes on your slides, changes you wouldn’t see (unless comparing different file versions) and which you may not agree with.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of PDF presentation?

A PDF version of your presentation has some unique features and limitations you should be aware of:

Universal

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It was developed by Adobe to present documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware or operating system. That means you have 100% control over how your slides will look on any platform, which you can’t take for granted for example with Windows- and Mac- generated PowerPoint files, especially when using advanced graphics and animations. In PDF format your slides will scale up or down depending on the screen size, but all elements will remain in their exact position.

Accessible

You can assume that all devices can nowadays read PDF files without forcing the user to install any specific programme or app. Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and others can all easily open PDF files. This makes your presentation immediately more convenient and mobile-friendly.

Non-editable

In general, the PDF version of your slides won’t let your readers modify your content. Anybody can add comments to a PDF file (eg. to provide feedback to the author), but editing gets much more complicated and requires specific skills and software.

Static

The PDF version of your presentation generated by simple and quick PowerPoint export won’t include animations, transitions, GIFs or videos you may have included in your slides. Furthermore, you may find your originally animated slides to be very difficult to read and distorted in your PDF file. Always check all pages of your PDF before distributing the file. There are ways to preserve or add dynamic elements to your PDF. However, these will require some additional work and sometimes an additional software license.

File size

In most cases, a PDF version of your presentation will be lighter than your master file. Therefore it is easier to email or upload online.

Plagiarism

Using PDF format won’t protect your content from someone copying it, but it makes it a bit more complicated or time-consuming. If you let someone access your editable PowerPoint presentation file (ppt/pptx), they can very easily copy some of the slides or the entire presentation, replacing the author’s name with their own.

When NOT to use PDF for your presentation?

Exporting your presentation to PDF format can solve some problems, but there are some situations when you should stick to your original editable master file or go for another solution.

Tutorials

Check out the Step-by-step tutorial on how to create PDF from Google Slides presentation.

Originally published at https://slidepresso.com on January 10, 2021.