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I have a PowerPoint presentation where I extensively use simple animations, only appear/disappear effects triggered by the mouse (not time based), without any smooth transitions.

Is it possible to export a PDF where every single step of the animation is on a separate slide?. The problem is that, exporting through the save-as menu, each slide in the pdf is just a snapshot of the corresponding powerpoint slide (with everything visible).

Example: Suppose I have the following slide that start visualizing the shape [A]:


clicking the mouse or pressing the right arrow triggers the 'appear' event for the shape [B]:

[A] -> [B]

clicking the mouse or pressing the right arrow triggers the 'disappear' event for the shape [A]:


The PDF exported file of this PowerPoint animation will have a single slide with [A] -> [B], while I would like to have three separate slides.

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2 Answers

up vote 39 down vote accepted

Converting a PPT to a PDF while maintaining the animation steps is something I too have been looking into for a long while, without finding a satisfactory solution.

That is why I have decided to write an add-in on my own which does exactly this:

  • splits the slides at each animation step (being it mouse-triggered or not depends on the user's choice)
  • while modifying (adding, deleting, altering) the shapes in the "fragmented slide" according to the animation effects.

If you are interested, I have packaged the add-in in an easy-to-use installer, which adds a toolbar (or tab, if you are using Office 2007) to your PowerPoint. In case you are not satisfied, you can easily remove the add-in using the standard Control Panel "Add/Remove Applications" tool.

You can get PPspliT here. Examples of usage are also provided.

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Hi Massimo, it works perfectly! It gives me an error (n.380) but it produces the correct result anyway. Thanks for your efforts in writing this application, I hope that it will gain the deserved visibility because it's very difficult to find on google! As a side note, I've been using latex-beamer and it looks fantastic, but, ironically, it suffer from the opposite problem: it is difficult to join slides for handouts :) I wonder why –  mrucci Nov 29 '09 at 21:12
Is there a way to get this working on a Mac? –  reseter Aug 25 '11 at 9:36
It works very well, even in Office 2013 on Windows 8! The only problem is that when the additional slides are created, the page number advances. It would be incredibly useful if the "expanded" slides conserved the the number of the original! (Or were called N-a, N-b, ...) –  JorgeGT Jan 17 '13 at 15:20
Nooooo it's an exe... I'm lost! –  John Berryman Oct 21 '13 at 18:44
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One thing you can do is to create a slide before every change in the animation, that way you can export it to pdf.

another option can be to run through the animation and take screen shots at regular intervals and then store them together.

Third option can be to write a macro using vba where using the macro you can run the animation within the slide and at each change in the animation you can copy the current slide to a new slide and then save all as pdf.May i know if you have to press a key/mousecick or each single step is automatic transition?

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I've already considered the first two options but the problem is they are very "static". If I need to modify the animation or the shapes, than I have to repeat this long process. The third option seems very promising and will probably do the job, +1 thank you, but I have a lecture tomorrow... I hoped there was a quicker solution! –  mrucci Nov 26 '09 at 12:15
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protected by slhck Dec 4 '12 at 17:23

