Convert PDFs to PowerPoint with PDF2Office

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Recosoft’s PDF2Office 3 (Standard and Personal editions) claims to create editable PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and several other formats from PDFs. Let’s admit that we were quite skeptical about this one. After all, we’ve lost count of how many people have asked about how they can create editable PowerPoint presentations from their PDFs. And maybe you are now wondering why anyone would want to create PowerPoints from their PDFs?

There are two reasons:

1. Many people create PDFs from their PowerPoint presentations and manage to lose (or delete) the original PowerPoints, and everything is fine until they need to make some changes. Then, they will start looking for the original PowerPoint file and they can’t find it.
2. Many other PowerPoint users want to insert one or more pages of some PDF in a PowerPoint slide/presentation, and they don’t like to link to a PDF and have PowerPoint warn them of dire security concerns each time they click on that link.

Typically, either problem doesn’t have a great solution. However, this product seemed to answer, at least to a large extent, both these issues. So, when the good folks at Recosoft sent a copy of their product, we were only too happy to throw a 100-page PDF manual for some software application. We then demanded that PDF2Office make an editable PPT from it! Now, you’ll agree that’s not something you’ll want to do all the time. Yet, it is good to know if this can be done or not.

So, we stared at the screen, shown below in the screenshot with a mixture of fascination and doubt. Amazingly, PDF2Office made a very nice PowerPoint presentation from the 100-page PDF. The result was a 100-slide PowerPoint deck with editable text and high-quality pictures!

PDF2Office allows ample control over the conversion. You can change image output resolution for the PowerPoint, decide which pages from the PDF you want to convert, choose font substitutions, and even ignore pages that don’t convert too well. We asked a spokesperson from Recosoft about the “skip pages that don’t convert” option and their response was that “…option exists as there are PDF documents where a certain page contains corrupt PDF data. Thus, that particular page becomes impossible to convert. So, PDF2Office will skip such a page and continue with the rest.”

One thing PDF2Office won’t do is convert password protected PDF files, unless you know the password, and that might be a blessing!

As the next version of Microsoft Office will include built-in PDF output, we believe many new users will want a product like this that will convert PDFs to PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents, but then Recosoft will have to make sure that their product is compatible with the next version of Microsoft Office. Recosoft’s spokesperson said that “As PDf2Office Personal/Standard v3.0 uses a modern Windows architecture to interface with Office, it works with the latest version of Office (i.e. Office 2007). We simply need to provide final verification once the real version ships. But as far as we know it works with the current versions.”

You can download a trial version of PDF2Office, learn more about Recosoft products, or buy them online at their site.