Save PowerPoint as PDF with notes

Why the notes disappear

The default layout of every exporter is Slides, one per page, which is what a deck sent to an audience should be. Speaker notes live in a separate part of the file, and PowerPoint writes them only when asked for a layout that includes them. On Windows that is a dropdown in Options. On a Mac the export and Save As dialogues have no such dropdown at all, so people click Export and get slides.

PowerPoint to PDF in this tab is a slides converter. It lays the visible slides out, one per page, counts the slide text in the finished PDF, and never writes the notes part of the file. Use it for the deck the audience sees. The plain export, with ranges, hidden slides and file size, is covered in Convert PowerPoint to PDF. This guide covers only the layouts that carry notes.

Notes pages on Windows

Options in the export dialogue has a Publish what dropdown: Slides, Handouts, Notes pages and Outline view. Notes pages writes one page per slide, portrait, with the slide image in the top half and the notes text in the bottom half. Hyperlinks on the slide image stay clickable, and the notes text is selectable. The Range box works with it, so a range of slides with notes is one export.

Frame slides adds a thin border around each slide image, which helps on a white slide. Include comments is separate from notes and writes reviewer comments, not speaker notes.

Notes on a Mac through the print dialogue

File, Print opens the macOS dialogue with PowerPoint's own Layout menu. Choose Notes and the preview changes to the slide-over-notes page. Then click PDF in the bottom left and Save as PDF. Because this is a print route, hyperlinks on the slides become plain text. That is the price of notes on a Mac, and there is no setting that avoids it.

Print, then Show Details if the dialogue opens in its short form. The Layout menu is not visible until it is expanded.

Handouts and notes on PowerPoint PDF pages

Handouts put several slides on a page: two, three, four, six or nine. The three-per-page handout has ruled lines beside each slide, meant for the audience to write on, and does not contain the speaker notes. Only Notes pages carries them. Outline view exports the slide titles and text as a text document with no images, which is occasionally what a reviewer wants.

For a slides PDF that already exists, N-up PDF puts 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 or 16 pages on one sheet in this tab and checks the result before the download, which makes a PowerPoint to PDF handout from a slides export without going back to PowerPoint. Convert the deck in the browser, then lay the pages out six to a sheet.

Making the notes readable

The notes page layout is set in View, Notes Master. The default notes text is 12 point in a box that takes the lower half of the page, and a slide with a page of notes is cut off at the box edge. Enlarge the notes placeholder in the master or shrink the slide image to give the text room, and check View, Notes Page for each slide with long notes before exporting.

Notes pages export in portrait, so the slide image is small. For a reader who mainly wants the notes that is fine; for one who wants the slide, send the slides export too.

When the notes PDF is too large

A notes page carries a full slide image plus text, so a forty-slide deck with photographs makes a PDF that email caps and web forms refuse. Compress PDF opens it in this tab, takes the size limit you type, recompresses the slide images, and reads the result back to check the pages against the original before the download. The notes text stays selectable, because the compressor never rasterises text.

Type the limit the recipient gave you rather than a smaller one; every step down costs picture quality on the slide images, and the notes are the part that has to stay readable.

Going the other way

A PDF of notes pages cannot be turned back into a deck with notes; the slide image and the text are page content, and a converter reads one slide per page. Keep the .pptx. If someone sends you a slides PDF and you need to edit it, PDF to PowerPoint writes one editable slide per page in this tab and reads the .pptx back before the download. The full list of deck and document guides is under PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint help.