Insert a PDF into Powerpoint

Posted on August 7, 2008 at 5:38 am

So you’re making a Powerpoint presentation and now you need to insert a PDF document into a slide correct? Well it seems easy enough right? Just click on the Insert menu, choose file and pick the PDF file! Unfortunately, I learned that it’s not that simple, especially if you are dealing with a PDF document that has more than one page.

Here I’ll show you how to get your PDF document into Powerpoint 2007 and some tricks if it’s more than a single page.

Firstly, open Powerpoint 2007 and click on the Insert ribbon.

At the far right, you’ll see the button called Object. That’s what we are going to need to use in order to import our PDF. The first open in the dialog should be Adobe Acrobat Document, if you have the Standard or Reader installed.

Click OK and you’ll get the open dialog box to choose the PDF file you want to insert. Browse to it and click OK. Adobe Reader will open and you can edit the document there if you like. After that, click on File and choose “Exit and return to Presentation_Name”.

You should now see your PDF document inserted into the current slide:

You can increase the size of the PDF by pulling on the corners of the blue box. If you were to run the presentation, the slide would show up and display exactly what you see above. That’s great if your PDF was only one page!

But if it’s more than one page, Powerpoint only shows you the first page of the PDF document! So in order to insert a multi-page PDF document, you have to split your PDF file into single page PDF documents! Luckily there is a free way to do this.

Download PDFHelper and run the EXE file. It doesn’t require any installation or anything of that sort. Once you run it, you’ll see three buttons:

Before clicking on START, copy your PDF file to the following directory:

C:\TEMP\pdfhelper\input

The program will read any single PDF file from there, automatically split it into multiple PDF files, and then save them in the Output folder.

So again, first start up the program, then copy the PDF file to the Input folder, then click the START button, and finally find the split files in the Output folder.

Now you’ll have to go back into Powerpoint and perform the same procedure like shown above to insert each PDF page into a separate slide. You can put more than one PDF onto one slide, but they may be too small to see clearly. Any questions, post a comment!

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4 Responses to “Insert a PDF into Powerpoint”

Cathy said on : September 7th, 2008 at 11:11 pm

Helpful but the next problem is how to insert multiple pdf files into Powerpoint in one go. I have about 30 pages and would like to be able to save time if possible.

Kate said on : September 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 pm

I’ve done all of the above - even splitting the pages and it works great, thanks for that - BUT - my file doesn’t actually open unless you click on it. It just shows that its an adobe acrobat file but you can’t actually see it.

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