Best Practices to Convert a Word Doc to PowerPoint Easily

Our blog introducing PowerPoint’s AI features a few months back stirred a lot of excitement around the potential to convert a Word doc to PowerPoint. While yes, it does have its restrictions, this is an incredibly useful tool once you figure out how to use it. It does take some finessing, but your simple Word document is easily transformed into a clear, storytelling PowerPoint with just five simple steps. Today, we’ll dive into a step-by-step tutorial all about how to do this—but first, let’s cover when it might work for you, and when it might not.

What to Know Before You Begin

This feature has not been made widely accessible to all applications quite yet. You’ll need access to the online version of the Microsoft suite in order to use this feature. Not only that, but Safari and Internet Explorer don’t currently support this functionality. In order to convert a Word doc to PowerPoint, we suggest using Google Chrome. In addition, currently, the only language supported is English. Finally, if you’re planning to use any sort of media (video clips, images, icons, etc), hold on to them until after your conversion. In summary, your best shot at this running smoothly for you is to open your Microsoft Word online document written in English in Google Chrome and go from there.

5 Simple Steps to Convert Word doc to PowerPoint

  1. Write everything you want to go onto your PowerPoint slides in a well-formatted Word document. A best practice here is to have titles, sub-points, bullets, etc all locked and loaded before you convert a Word doc to Powerpoint. I suggest bolding any titles to make sure they don’t get lost.
  2. Using Google Chrome, sign in to your Microsoft Office Online account, and open your Word document.
  3. Click File> Export. Your options are then “Transform to a web page” or “Export to Powerpoint Presentation (Preview)”. Click the latter.
  4. Pick a theme, and then wait just a moment for your powerpoint to generate. You’ll get a notification when it’s done that is as excited as you are!
  5. Double-check when you convert a Word Doc to PowerPoint that all of your text from the doc made it to the PowerPoint. I noticed with mine, the title and the closing slides were a bit off. I had to do two quick copy and pastes to re-incorporate what I had written in my Word Doc. As you can see, it generated some design elements, and even transformed my bullet points into accurate icons! I didn’t make any tweaks to the icons at all.

Best Practices Overview

Overall, if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort to convert a Word doc to Powerpoint, you should be pretty pleased with the results. Note that different themes may generate different results. If you’re unhappy with the overall conversion and want to explore another theme, simply go back to the Word document and choose a different theme. You may be surprised by how varied the results can be.

While this simple conversion can work for many decks, it certainly won’t work for all of them. If you find yourself in need of design help, we’re happy to jump in and take the lead! We’ve been designing PowerPoints for over 15 years, and we’re confident we can steer your deck in a design direction you will love. Reach out today for a free quote!

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