Converting slides in Word to PowerPoint

[Barney Capehart]

I have a lot of old presentation slides in MS Word that I
would like to convert to PowerPoint. I am hoping to find a
way that preserves the format of both text and graphics. I
have tried cut and paste, send to, reading the Word file
directly into PP, etc. None of these approaches preserves
the formatting, and most do not bring in the graphics at
all.

I have resorted to converting the Word file to a PDF, and
saving the PDF file in jpeg form. Then I can insert each
page as a picture. That works fairly well, but I cannot
edit the pages. I would really like to just directly
convert the Word file into an editable PP file.

If anybody knows how to do this quickly and simply, I
would greatly appreciate learning the trick!

Barney Capehart
University of Florida
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Echo S]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Barney, but what you're asking for
just isn't possible, especially since you still need the files to be
editable.

I think your best solution will be to bite the bullet and use Send to
PPT to get the text into the slides, then copy/paste your graphics over.

PPT will determine the formatting of the various titles and bulleted
text from Word, so spending time making your master slides have the
formatting you want (mimicking Word's formatting) will be helpful. Also,
you'll want to use styles in Word to determine what ends up where. That
is, Heading 1 in Word = a title in PPT. Heading 2 = a primary bullet in
PPT. Heading 3 = a secondary bullet in PPT, etc. At least you can get
the text where you want it that way. Well, for the most part, maybe.

 

[Jeff Chapman]

I didn't quite understand what you meant when you
said, "I have a lot of old presentation slides in MS Word."
Do you mean that the Word "slides" are thumbnails
from PowerPoint, or are you simply showing the
Word document on-screen as a presentation?
In the latter case, assuming you are using landscape
format for your Word document, it seems a better
idea for you to convert it to full-screen mode PDF
(you will need the full version of Acrobat for this,
unless there is another third-party utility that can
do the trick). Then you can do all your editing in
Word, without having to convert to PowerPoint.
Obviously you will not get the animation effects
and so on, but if that is not important to you, try it out.

- Jeff

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

In the latter case, assuming you are using landscape

format for your Word document, it seems a better
idea for you to convert it to full-screen mode PDF
(you will need the full version of Acrobat for this,
unless there is another third-party utility that can
do the trick).

As an aside, there are several third-party utilities, including a couple of
very capable free ones:

How do I make a PDF?
http://www.rdpslides.com/psfaq/FAQ00008.htm