PodoLay

User guide

How to use the PodoLay web portal and editor — the same content the help assistant (chatbot) reads.

User guide

Importing PowerPoint files

How to move a PowerPoint presentation (.pptx) into a PodoLay layout, and what comes across unchanged and what changes. Each slide becomes one page.

How to import

You can import .pptx files (including .ppsx, .potx and .pptm). Old PowerPoint files (.ppt) and password-protected files can't be opened — in PowerPoint, use File › Save As › PowerPoint Presentation (.pptx) and save without a password, then import that file. For Keynote and Google Slides documents, use a file exported as .pptx.

  1. On the portal dashboard, click Import and choose PowerPoint (pptx).
  2. Choose the .pptx with Choose file…. The slide size and number of slides are shown, and the title is filled in from the file name.
  3. Click Create. A new layout with the slide size is created, and the editor opens in a new tab.
  4. In the Import PowerPoint window, choose the slides and options to import, then click Import.

You can also import from the editor. In a new, empty layout, choose a .pptx with Import Manuscript in the top bar's File menu (⌘D/Ctrl+D), or drag a .pptx onto the canvas. You can't import into a layout that already has content — a PowerPoint file always becomes a new layout.

The page size is the slide size (960×540pt for a 16:9 slide, 720×540pt for 4:3). To change to a print trim size, change it in Layout Setup after importing.

Related questions

  • Can I open a PowerPoint deck in PodoLay?
  • How do I import a .ppt file?
  • Can I bring in a Keynote or Google Slides presentation?
  • Can I turn my slides into a book-sized layout?

Import options

The top of the Import PowerPoint window shows the number of slides, the slide size, and the number of layouts, images, tables and charts. The options are as follows; the values you chose last are used again next time.

  • Slides: All or Range (e.g. 1-10, 12). If there are hidden slides, Also import hidden slides appears — turn it off to leave hidden slides out.
  • Speaker notes: Don’t import, or put the note text on a page after each slide. A notes page contains only the note text.
  • Text formatting: With Turn the master’s title and body formatting into paragraph styles on, the slide master's title and per-level body formatting become the Slide Title and Slide Body 1–5 paragraph styles, applied to the text in placeholders — change one style and every slide title changes. With Convert bullets and numbers to text on, bullets and numbers are inserted as characters (symbol + tab), keeping PowerPoint's per-level indents exactly.
  • Embedded fonts: If the file contains fonts, choose whether to upload them as user fonts. They are uploaded only if you check the license confirmation. Subset fonts that contain only some characters, and fonts with restricted embedding, are not uploaded.

The bottom of the window shows how many pages will be created. If that exceeds your plan's pages per layout, Import is disabled — narrow the range.

Related questions

  • Can I import only some of the slides?
  • Do speaker notes come across?
  • What happens to hidden slides?
  • My deck has too many slides to import

Report

When the import finishes, the layout reopens and the PowerPoint file imported window shows Imported, Changed and Not imported separately — the number of pages, masters, objects, text boxes, tables and images, the list of replaced fonts, the effects that were approximated, and the elements left out with their slide numbers. It can't be shown again after you close it, so check it then if you need to.

Related questions

  • Can I see what changed after importing my slides?
  • Where do I find what was left out?

What comes across unchanged

  • Slide masters and layouts: each layout becomes a master, with its background and decorative objects on the master. If a slide changed its background, a separate master with that background is created.
  • Objects: all of PowerPoint's preset shapes (arrows, callouts, stars, flowchart shapes and so on) and freeform shapes, lines, connectors and arrowheads, groups, rotation and flipping, solid, gradient and picture fills, transparency, line weight, dashes and caps, shadow, glow and soft edges.
  • Text: text in shapes and text boxes, placeholder (title and body) text with the formatting inherited from layouts and masters, character formatting (size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, character spacing, superscript/subscript, caps, text color, highlight, outline), paragraph formatting (alignment, indents, line spacing, space before and after, tabs), bullets and numbering, text box insets, vertical alignment, columns and vertical text, and slide numbers.
  • Text that was shrunk by AutoFit is imported at the size PowerPoint shrank it to.
  • Tables: column widths, row heights, merged cells, cell fills, borders, insets and vertical alignment, and the colors and text formatting of table styles (header row, banded rows).
  • Images: PNG, JPG, GIF, TIFF and BMP images and their cropping, images cropped to a shape, and background pictures.
  • SmartArt: imported as shape groups, in the form PowerPoint saved in the file.

If a PowerPoint font isn't available, it is replaced with a font of similar character widths (e.g. Calibri and Arial → Roboto, Times New Roman → EB Garamond). If lines still get longer and text overflows its box, a text box without fill or stroke is made taller, and the text of a filled shape is split off into a separate text box grouped with the shape, so the overflowing text stays visible. If you upload the same font as a user font, the text sets almost exactly like the original.

Related questions

  • Do slide masters come across?
  • My text overflows the text box
  • The fonts changed after importing
  • Do custom shapes keep their geometry?

What changes or isn't carried over

  • Colors are imported as RGB. When you create a print PDF they are converted to CMYK and may look slightly different from the screen. Slide images are often at screen resolution, so preflight may show resolution warnings.
  • Charts are left as empty frames labeled with the chart type and title.
  • EMF and WMF images (such as diagrams pasted from Office) and images linked outside the file are left as empty graphic frames. Save those images as PNG in PowerPoint and place them again.
  • Videos and audio come in only as their poster image, and embedded objects (OLE) only as their preview image.
  • Animations, transitions, comments and hyperlinks (the text remains) are not imported.
  • Tiled picture fills are stretched as a single image, pattern fills become a similar solid color, and double lines become single lines. Reflections, 3-D formatting, picture corrections (brightness, contrast, recolor) and WordArt text transforms are dropped.
  • SmartArt becomes a shape group, so editing its text doesn't re-layout it.
  • Image flips can't be carried over; images are left unflipped.
  • Import is one-way — a PodoLay layout can't be exported as .pptx. To hand it to other programs, save it as PDF or EPUB (see the Exporting topic).

Related questions

  • My chart came in empty
  • Some images are missing after import
  • Are animations and transitions imported?
  • Can I export back to PowerPoint?