Animated slides conversion to static PDF

Question

For all of you, people who make ppt slides with animations like:

• Showing bullet points one by one
• Showing images one by one or zooming a plot
• Showing a border on an active element
• Internal navigation / menu / link to another slide
• Transitions between slides

Is there a tool that can convert the ppt to PDF and keep each animation in a separate slide, for example?

I know you can create animated slides with LaTeX Beamer that convert nicely to PDF, I have made some of those, but I also have some ppt files that I want to convert to PDF.

This is what I have tried so far:

• Slideshare, however not only it doesn't support animations, but internal navigation doesn't work, and the fonts are all messed up.
• PDFcreator, the quality is quite superior in comparison, but it doesn't support the animations neither. As Slideshare, it will just put one image over the other. Also, it doesn't support transparency (for example, a text box with a semitransparent bg over an image)
• LaTeX Beamer, already mentioned, but I would prefer to avoid typing these ppts content and animations into LaTeX just so that the animations are displayed correctly in PDF.

I have searched SO and didn't find a satisfactory answer to deal with animations. What do you use?

Answer 1

I found a small plugin that splits your powerpoint slides whenever they have animations. So if you have 3 animations on 1 slide he will generate 3 slides with each animation step by step. Then export it in PDF :-)

It worked for me on powerpoint 2010. I would recommend you do a backup file of presentation before splitting. And don't forget to uncheck the "Split on click-triggered animations".

http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~rimondin/downloads.php

I also found this (but the first solution was free and worked so :-)) http://www.verypdf.com/wordpress/201306/how-to-create-a-pdf-from-powerpoint-with-animations-36850.html

Answer 2

This blog post provides a VBA macro script that will split every slide that has animations (e.g. images or bullet points that appear one by one) into multiple slides, and then you can save as PDF and voila!

Importantly, since it's a VBA script it should work both for Windows and Mac. I've only tried it on OSX (yosemite) with powerpoint 2011, and it worked pretty well. The only issue I had was that slides with animated bullet points (that appear one by one) were split into multiple slides but every slide contained all the bullet points, so I had to delete some manually. Still, for everything else it worked perfectly and it's a small price to pay compared to doing it all manually, especially image animations. Of course you may/may not encounter the same issue on Windows or other versions of PP. In any case, for OSX it's the only working solution I've found so far.

Instructions for adding VBA macros to powerpoint can be found here.

Hope it works for you too!