Advanced Exporter for PowerPointAn add-in, from Stoatworks Labs ·

PowerPoint will save a deck as a PDF, a picture per slide or a video, and it asks you remarkably little about any of them. This add-in does all of those with the options left in — size, resolution, quality, slide range, letterboxing — and then carries on into the formats PowerPoint never got round to: a self-contained HTML5 presentation, reveal.js, LaTeX Beamer, Markdown and Marp, handouts, notes pages, and a few more.

Download manifest.xml

One small XML file. It points PowerPoint at this site; nothing is installed on your machine and nothing about your deck leaves it. Source and issues on GitHub

Where it has been tried

Built and tested against PowerPoint for Mac 16.112. PowerPoint for Windows and on the web are in the manifest but haven't been run here. If you try either, say how it went.

What it exports

ImagesPNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF (single or multi-page, LZW/Deflate/PackBits), BMP, TGA, GIF, SVG with live links, and a contact sheet. Any size from a thumbnail to 8K, or a print resolution in dpi, letterboxed or cropped to an exact raster when the deck's shape doesn't match the screen's.
DocumentsPowerPoint's own vector PDF, trimmed to a range or split per slide; a picture PDF that keeps hidden slides and links; handouts 1, 2, 3 (with lines), 4, 6 or 9 to a page; notes pages; a Word notes document; OpenDocument.
WebA self-contained HTML5 presentation with transitions, a presenter view, clickable links and the deck's embedded video; reveal.js; a scrolling page that reads well on a phone.
VideoMP4 (H.264, HEVC, AV1) and WebM (VP9, VP8, AV1) at any frame rate, timed from the deck's rehearsed timings or your own, with captions from the notes; animated GIF.
TextLaTeX Beamer — the slides as drawn, or rebuilt as editable LaTeX — or a LaTeX article with the notes; Markdown, Marp and Pandoc/Quarto; an outline PowerPoint reads back in; the speaker notes alone; CSV; JSON.
PowerPointA cleaned copy (notes, comments, hidden slides or personal details removed), as a show or a template; one file per slide; a flattened deck of pictures that plays the same on a machine without your fonts.

Install

Office add-ins install from a manifest. Download the file above, then:

PowerPoint for Mac

  1. Copy manifest.xml into ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Documents/wef/ (make the wef folder if it isn't there).
  2. Quit PowerPoint completely (⌘Q) and open it again.
  3. Open a deck, then Home ▸ Add-ins ▸ Developer Add-ins ▸ Advanced Exporter. After that first time an Advanced Exporter button stays on the Home tab.

PowerPoint on the web, and Microsoft 365 on Windows

  1. Home ▸ Add-ins ▸ More Add-ins (or Insert ▸ Add-ins), then My Add-ins ▸ Upload My Add-in.
  2. Pick the downloaded manifest.xml. The pane opens from the Home tab.

The honest limits

Animations don't come along. Every picture-based format shows each slide as it looks once its builds have finished. Video and GIF are slides with transitions between them, not a recording of the slide show.

Hidden slides aren't in PowerPoint's PDF. The vector PDF formats say so when your range includes one; the picture-based ones draw it anyway.

It needs a reasonably recent PowerPoint for the best pictures. PowerPoint draws each slide for the add-in on version 16.96 or later on a Mac, and Microsoft 365 version 2504 or later on Windows. Older versions (and Office LTSC) fall back to rasterising PowerPoint's PDF, which works but leaves hidden slides out.

Open source under the MIT licence. PDF text uses Noto Sans (SIL Open Font Licence). WebP and AVIF encoding is Squoosh's codecs via jSquash (Apache 2.0); PDFs are written with pdf-lib and read with pdf.js (MIT, Apache 2.0).