PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Export all presentation text

Have you ever wanted to export all of the text in a presentation? There are several reasons for doing this:

• To repurpose the text to a report or other document
• To give a presentation a makeover, starting with just the text
• To use as notes during delivery

If, and only if, all of the text is in text placeholders, this is an easy task. I've already explained this procedure in Export the text in a presentation.

But what if you have text in text boxes and AutoShapes? You may need this text as well. In fact, this may be just the text that you're trying to reformat.

Steve Rindsberg offers two VBA routines that you can use to export text in AutoShapes.

At PowerPoint Live, Rick Altman discussed this issue and suggested two solutions:

• Miraplacid Text Driver. This program extracts text from all types of documents. It costs $49.95. There's a free trial.
• Use Adobe Acrobat, print to a PDF file, and save as a text file. It costs $299, and of course also gives you the ability to create, combine, and control PDF files from many programs.

Rick's discussion set me searching for a free solution. First, look at my dummy presentation, which I created with labels to help me troubleshoot any problems.

Here are the steps:

1. Download PDF995, a free PDF creator, supported by ads. (You can remove the ads for $9.95. Paying for the software also entitles you to technical support, which I've used more than once.) Another option is PrimoPDF. I used PDF995 to test these steps.
2. In your presentation, choose File> Print. Choose PDF 995 from the list of printers. (This is how you use the program to create PDF files.) Save the file. Adobe Reader opens with your new PDF file. (The steps below were done with Adobe Reader 7.0.)

3. Do either of the following:

• Choose File> Save as Text to create a text file from the PDF. This will extract all of the text in the document. However, you may have some unusual characters that you need to delete. (Look at the 2 small boxes in the text below.)

• Choose View> Page Layout> Continuous (or choose the Continuous button at the lower-left corner of the application window). Click before the first character. If you don't see the Select tool (look for an I-beam), choose Tools> Basic> Select. Drag downward, waiting until the document scrolls, until you reach the end of the document. (For some reason, this process is slow and clunky.) With the entire document selected, copy to the Clipboard. Open Notepad, and paste. You can see the result below. It's very clean.

I assume that you can use this technique with other types of documents as well. If you succeed, I'd be interested to hear in your results. Contact me.

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