How can I make Acrobat PDFs from PowerPoint?
If you have PowerPoint 2007 or higher
If you have PowerPoint 2007, there's a free add-in from Microsoft that lets you export PDF directly from PowerPoint. 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS
If you've already installed Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Office 2007, or have Office 2010, you already have this add-in.
If you have Macintosh PowerPoint X or higher
If you have Mac PowerPoint X, you can save directly to a PDF using OS X's built-in PDF feature.
See How to create PDFs from Mac PowerPoint to learn how.
If you have Windows PowerPoint 2003 or previous
You can make PDFs by printing to the printer driver installed by Adobe Acrobat or one of the other commonly available PDF drivers/utilities (see below).
If you own Acrobat (the full commercial product, not the free Reader) you can create PDFs from virtually any program that can print. Once you've installed Acrobat, you'll find that you have a new printer driver called AdobePDF. Open any document, choose the AdobePDF driver and print. It will ask you to supply a name for your PDF file. Give it one, click OK and you've made a PDF.
Details may vary depending on the version of Acrobat you own and on whether you use a Mac, PC or other system, but that's basically how it works.
If you don't have Acrobat
These free or inexpensive programs also create PDFs:
- PDF Creator from Jaws Systems, makes it simple to print directly to PDF files from Windows apps. Fully functional demos available for Windows and Mac. PDF Creator is extremely fast and is easy to use. It's equivalent to the Distiller and Distiller printer driver portions of Acrobat. It lets you print to PDF files or convert Postscript or EPS to PDF, just as you can with Distiller.
- Nitro PDF Express is an inexpensive (around US$50) PDF-making program. There's also Nitro PDF Pro for around $100, which adds the ability to edit, combine and do lots of other useful things with PDFs once they're created.
- Angus Johnson lists several other PDF-making utilities and other interesting related software here
- The free GhostScript/GhostView can create PDFs from PostScript files much the way Distiller does. There's a more detailed description of GhostScript and download links at PS-related software.
Free PDF XP acts as a printer driver, and helps bridge RedMon and GhostScript, which you'll also need to download and install. That link actually goes to a download/review site. The product site itself is in German. (but there's a English link at the top left under the logo that leads to a machine-translated version of the site. The program itself can be switched to English, if you click on "Konfigurieren" and an English manual is available on the website. It also requires Ghostscript to be installed first, a link is provided on the Download site. - PStill by Frank Siegart is available in various commercial/shareware/free versions for Windows, MacOS X, NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, Linux, Sun Solaris, SHI IRIX, HP UX and IBM AIX.
- Free PrimoPDF uses GhostScript "under the hood" to produce PDFs and as its name implies, the price is right
- PDF995 is yet another option - their free PDF converter also uses GhostScript; they also have pdfEdit995, which lets you do some of the same sorts of tricks as you'd normally do in Acrobat, and Signature995, for encrypting and signing PDFs. Very inexpensive.
There are also several GDI- or non-PostScript applications (ie, like PDFWriter) that can create PDF:
- Dane Prairie has a driver that "prints" directly to PDF
- PDFCamp Pdf writer looks promising. The Pro version offers a lot of features for just $38.
There's good info about PDF-making tools and lots more on Hans Le Roy's site. Take time to explore the rest of the site while you're there. It's a gold mine.
But for the best results with PowerPoint
However you create your PDFs, they may be missing some of the interactive features you added to your original PowerPoint presentation. Support for links, action buttons, sounds or movies may be lacking.
Our Prep4PDF PowerPoint add-in lets you preserve most of the interactivity in your PowerPoint presentations when you convert to PDF. You can learn more at our Prep4PDF site.