You can display PDFs as-is by sharing yournew Chromebook’s screenwith your audience, but scrolling through pages isn’t engaging. With a little touch-up in Google Slides, you can make a great presentation out of a PDF file. This step-by-step guide shows you how to convert a PDF to Google Slides to keep your audience engaged.

Google Slides: Perfect for collaborative presentations

With Google Slides, part of Google’s free online office suite, creating and sharing presentations has never been easier. You can access it anywhere through a web browser, Android and iOS mobile apps, or a ChromeOS desktop.

Thanks to its compatibility with Microsoft PowerPoint, it’s one of the best presentation tools. Moreover, every edit is recorded in a detailed revision history, so you and your team can work on presentations simultaneously. Each editor has its own colors and cursors, plus a permissions system to make teamwork easier.

The Google Slides logo against a presentation done primarily in yellow and orange

The benefits of choosing Google Slides over PDFs for Presentations

While PDFs are popular for their ease of shareability and compact nature, they can be limiting for presentations. Google Slides offers a compelling way to present projects with engaging visuals and annotations.

What’s more, PDFs hinder real-time teamwork on crucial projects, whether in business or academia. Google Slides solves this, allowing access and collaboration from any device, anywhere, as long as you’re connected to your Google account.

CloudConvert homepage, focusing on the PDF conversion section. There is a prominent “Select File” button and lists of file formats available for conversion from and to PDF.

The best Google Slides templates for work, school, and home

Slide into success with one of these beautiful templates for business, personal, and school use

Converting PDF to PowerPoint for Google Slides

Since Google Slides doesn’t support inserting a PDF, you must convert your PDF file to a PowerPoint file. This may change the formatting, but you can adjust the PowerPoint file as needed.

You can use several tools, such as PDFelement for Windows or Mac. Many online website tools like ILovePDF and CloudConvert convert files without installing an app. For demonstration purposes, we use CloudConvert.

The interface of CloudConvert’s website during the process of converting a file. A document is queued for conversion from PDF to PPT and PPTX format.

If your PDF is in Google Drive, add CloudConvert to your Google Workspace. With it, you can open and convert PDF files from your Google Drive. You can also open the file with Google Slides after the conversion. Here’s how to get it done:

After conversion, you can open the downloaded file in Google Slides if you initiated the conversion from Google Drive. This step allows you to bypass the manual download and upload process, streamlining your workflow.

CloudConvert interface displaying a successful conversion along with a green “Download” button, indicating that the file is ready to be downloaded

Converting PDF to images for Google Slides

If editing the text in your converted files isn’t a priority, convert your PDFs into images and insert them into your Google Slides presentations. The easiest way to do this is with software like Adobe Acrobat or alternative online tools.

This keeps the original formatting of your PDFs when inserting them into Google Slides. For this tutorial, Adobe Acrobat is our tool of choice. Here’s a step-by-step guide to converting your PDFs into images:

A Google Drive interface with a context menu open for a selected file. The menu offers various options such as Connect more apps

You can also add your converted images from Google Drive or another online platform.

You can insert the PDF file as a link in Google Slides. End users can use the hyperlinked image or text in your presentation as a reference point to view the PDF file. You can do this by following these steps:

Take your presentations to the next level with AI tools

Now that you know how to convert a PDF to a Google Slides presentation, put your skills to the test and brag in front of your peers.Generative AIslikeGoogle Geminican make your presentations look even better, resulting in an informative and eye-catching presentation that leaves a lasting impression.