Convert Google Slides to PDF

Two menus, two different PDFs

File, Download, PDF Document is the fast route to export Google Slides as PDF. It makes one page per slide, at the deck's size, with the speaker notes left out and skipped slides omitted. That is right for a deck you are sending to be read.

File, Print preview is the route for anything else. Its layout menu is the only place Slides offers Google Slides to PDF with notes: 1 slide with notes puts the slide at the top of a portrait page and the notes below. The handout layouts put 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 slides on a page. Hide background strips the theme for printing. Download as PDF then writes what the preview shows. The system print dialog is not needed and, on most browsers, makes a worse file.

Either way the PDF holds real text, so it is selectable and searchable, and fonts are embedded. Transitions and animations are dropped. A video on a slide becomes a still picture, and an embedded YouTube video becomes its thumbnail.

How to save a Google Slide as PDF on a phone

Open the deck in the Slides app, tap the More button (three dots) at the top right, tap Share and export, then Save as, then PDF. The app writes the slides-only version; notes and handout layouts are not offered on the phone. Choose Save to Files on an iPhone or the Downloads folder on Android. For a single slide, duplicate the deck, delete the other slides, and export that copy.

A downloaded .pptx works here too

A deck that is already on your machine as a .pptx, from File, Download, Microsoft PowerPoint or from PowerPoint itself, converts in the browser tab with PowerPoint to PDF. It takes one file at a time and proves the slide text reached the PDF before the download appears. The PowerPoint route and its notes options are in Convert PowerPoint to PDF.

Making the PDF small enough to send

Slides exports images at the size they were inserted, so a deck built from phone photos is large. Drop the PDF on Compress PDF, type the limit as the target, and the tool tries more than one method and keeps the smallest result that still opens. It reads the compressed file back before the download, so the page count and the slide text are confirmed. Text, shapes and charts are vector data and cost almost nothing; the savings come from the pictures.

If the deck itself must be smaller in Drive, replace the largest images inside Slides with resized copies. The PDF export of the trimmed deck is then small before any compression.

Going the other way

A PDF cannot be opened in Slides, but a .pptx can be imported with File, Import slides. Convert PDF to Google Slides uses the PDF to PowerPoint tool for that, one slide per page with the text editable. If you only want to show a PDF full screen, without editing it, Turn a PDF into a slideshow is the shorter answer. A Google Sheet exports through a similar dialog, covered in Convert Google Sheets to PDF, and the rest of the Office guides are under PDF, Word and Excel help.