I was given a PDF of a presentation and asked to give a presentation on it. I’d like to use what is there and edit it a bit. I’d also like to not be presenting out of a PDF and use proper presentation software. I prefer PowerPoint to Keynote because someone else will give this presentation after me and I’d like them not to have the same problem of “here’s a file you can’t use”.

Didn’t work: Google Docs

Gmail offered to open the PDF in Google docs. The images got completely messed up. The ones that converted were in the wrong place compared to the words in the presentation and each other. Then after a number of pages, Google gave up on converting images.

Didn’t work: Drag from Mac preview to Keynote

Yes, I know I said I preferred PowerPoint for this task. However, it’s easy to export from Keynote to PowerPoint so it would have been fine as an intermediary. However, there were three problems

1. You have to drag one slide at a time and there are 55 slides
2. After dragging, it is just an image that isn’t even the same slze as the slide
3. The slide is an image so I have to recreate any I want to edit.

What worked: Convert to KeyNote

CleverPDF has a PDF converter that lets you convert to a variety of formats. One is PowerPoint. (They also have Keynote). They make their money through a mix of ads and paid products. I didn’t look how secure your data is as this is essentially a public presentation (and not for my job)

I’m impressed with Clever PDF. The transformed file looks the same and is editable. And free.