So you have a PDF document and you want to open it in Google Slides. Well, there are actually three different ways you might want to do that, and in this article, I’m going to walk you through all of them.
Prefer to watch a video about how to open a PDF in Google Slides? Click here.
One way you might want to open a PDF in Google slides is to actually convert the entire PDF document into a Google Slides presentation so that each page of the PDF will become a slide of the presentation.
From there, you could then present it as a presentation, make changes to it in Google Slides, and even re-download it as a PDF after making some changes if you want so that you’re effectively using Google Slides as a PDF editor.
Or, another way you might want to open a PDF in Google Slides is to just insert one page of the PDF within one of the slides of the presentation somewhere just like inserting an image.
And, the third and final way you might want to open a PDF in Google Slides is to merge the PDF into an existing Google Slides presentation. This is pretty similar to the first option where every page in the PDF will become a slide in the presentation.
But instead of the PDF document just becoming a Google Slides presentation, this method will merge all or some of the pages of the PDF in with the existing slides of the existing presentation.
So if you want to go with option one and convert the entire PDF into a presentation, I’ll show you how to do that below.
But, if you want to insert just one page into an existing slide of an existing presentation, you can click here to skip down to where I show you how to do that. Or, if you want to merge your PDF document with an existing presentation, you can click here to skip down to where I show you how to do that.
How To Convert A PDF Into A Google Slides Presentation
To convert your PDF into a Google Slides presentation, unfortunately, Google Slides doesn’t actually have a built in way to do that, so you’ll have to convert the PDF into a PowerPoint presentation first using an online tool (don’t worry, you don’t actually need to have PowerPoint), and then you can open the PowerPoint presentation in Google Slides.
So to do that, you’ll just need to head over to https://smallpdf.com/pdf-to-ppt/, and then, once you’re there, click on the “Choose Files” button to select your PDF.
Now, a files window will pop up on the screen, and you’ll need to double click on the PDF you want to convert.
Now, your PDF will upload to the converter website, and begin converting into a PowerPoint presentation.
This process should only take a few seconds, and then, once it’s done, you’ll see a page telling you to download your file. And you’ll just need to click the “Download” button to download your PDF as a PowerPoint presentation.
Now you have a PowerPoint version of your PDF saved to your computer. So now you’re ready to open it in Google Slides! To do that, simply go to the Google Slides homepage and click the plus button labeled “Blank” just like you would do if you wanted to create a new blank Google Slide.
Now, it will obviously open up a new blank Google Slides presentation, but you don’t need to choose a theme, add a title, or anything like that, instead, simply click on “File” in the menu across the top of the screen…
And then, in the menu that appears, click “Open”.
Now, it will bring up all the presentations you have stored in Google Drive so that you could open one of those if you wanted to. But the PowerPoint file you just downloaded will be on your computer, so you’ll actually need to click “Upload”…
And then, click on the “Select a file from your device” button.
Now, a files window will pop up, and you’ll just need to double click on the PowerPoint file that you just downloaded in order to upload it to Google Slides.
Now, it will take a few seconds to upload, but then, once it’s uploaded, the page will reload and your PDF will now be open in Google Slides with a different slide for each page!
And every different shape, text box, image, etc that was in the PDF will now be added as it’s own object in Google Slides. So if you want to change some of the text, you can just click the cursor in the text box and change it. Or if you want to move something around, you can just click and drag it.
It’s really all editable just like it would be if it had always been a Google Slides presentation.
It doesn’t always work perfectly, for example, if you look a page three of the PDF I’ve just opened, you’ll see it has become a bit muddled so you might just need to go through and spend some time manually fixing a few errors like this. But mostly it will work pretty well.
How To Re-Download The Presentation As A PDF
So now that you’ve opened your PDF in Google Slides and made some changes, if you want to re-download it as a PDF, you can do that very easily.
All you need to do is click on “File” in the menu across the top of the screen…
And then, in the menu that appears, hover over “Download”…
And then, in the menu that appears next to that, click “PDF Document (.pdf)”.
Now, it will re-download to your computer as a PDF! But this new PDF will contain any of the changes you made in Google Slides.
How To Insert One Page Of A PDF Into An Existing Presentation
If you don’t want to convert your PDF into a Google Slides presentation, and instead just want to show a page of the PDF within one of the slides of an existing presentation, the first thing you’ll need to do is actually convert your PDF file into a PNG file.
This is because Google Slides doesn’t actually allow you to insert a PDF into your presentation, but it does allow you to insert images, so if you convert your PDF into an image, you’ll be able to insert it into the presentation.
To do this, you’ll just need to go to: https://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-png, and click on the “Choose File” button to choose your PDF.
Now, a files window will appear on the screen, and you’ll just need to find the PDF and double click on it to upload it to the file converter website.
Now, the PDF will begin uploading to the website, and you’ll see the upload progress near the bottom of the screen.
Then, once it’s uploaded, simply click the “Start” button near the bottom left corner of the screen and it will begin converting your PDF into a PNG.
This process will take a few seconds, but once it’s done, you’ll see a page that says “Success – We Converted Your File”.
And now, if your PDF was only one page long, it should automatically start downloading to your computer as a PNG. But, if your PDF has multiple pages, each page of the PDF will have been converted into it’s own individual PNG file, and each of those files will be listed out separately.
So in this example, the file called “Timmy’s Example PDF Document_00001.png” is the first page of the PDF, the file called “Timmy’s Example PDF Document_00002.png” is the second page of the PDF, and so on.
So if you just want to insert page four of the PDF into your Google Slides presentation, you can just download page four by clicking the “Download” button next to the file named “Name Of PDF Document_00004.png”…
And, it will download to your computer.
So, now that a PNG version of the page of the PDF you want to insert into the Google Slide is downloaded to your computer, you can go ahead and insert it into the presentation.
To do that, simply open up your Google Slides presentation and click on the slide you want to insert the PDF into. Then, click on the image icon in the menu across the top of the screen…
And then, in the menu that appears, click “Upload From computer”.
Now, a files window will pop up and you’ll need to find the PNG you just downloaded (it will probably be in the downloads folder) and double click on it to insert it into the Google Slides presentation.
Now, the page of your PDF will appear in your presentation as an image.
It probably won’t be in the most ideal position, and it might be covering some of the existing content. But it’s now just like any other image in Google Slides, so you can click and drag to resize it and move it around so that it fits into your presentation perfectly.
And that’s all there is to it!
How To Merge A PDF With An Existing Presentation
If you want to merge a PDF Document with an existing Google Slides presentation so that some or all of the pages in your PDF will become slides in your existing presentation, the first thing you’ll need to do is actually convert your PDF into a PowerPoint presentation (don’t worry, you don’t need to have PowerPoint) with the help of a free file converter website, and then you’ll be able to merge it with your Google Slides presentation in Google Slides.
To do that, you’ll just need to head over to https://smallpdf.com/pdf-to-ppt/, and then, once you’re there, click on the “Choose Files” button to select your PDF.
Now, a files window will pop up on the screen, and you’ll need to double click on the PDF you want to convert.
Now, your PDF will upload to the converter website and begin converting into a PowerPoint presentation.
This process should only take a few seconds, and then, once it’s done, you’ll see a page telling you to download your file. And you’ll just need to click the “Download” button to download your PDF as a PowerPoint presentation.
Now you have a PowerPoint version of your PDF saved to your computer. So you’re ready to open it in Google Slides and merge it with your existing presentation.
To do that, open up the existing presentation in Google Slides, and then click on “File” in the menu across the top of the screen…
Then, in the menu that appears, click on “Import slides”.
Now, you will see all the presentations that you have in Google Drive so you could import slides from one of those if you wanted to. But the PowerPoint version of your PDF file has been downloaded to your computer, so you’ll need to click on “Upload”…
And then, in the menu that appears, click on the “Select a file from your device” button.
Now, a files window will pop up and you’ll need to find the PowerPoint version of the PDF that you downloaded earlier (it will probably be in the downloads folder), and double click on it to upload it to Google Slides.
Now, after it uploads, you’ll see all the different pages of your PDF, and you’ll need to click on each page that you want to insert into the presentation.
So if you want to insert all the pages, you’ll need to click on each one of them, or if you only want to insert (for example), pages one and four, just click on pages one and four.
Then, once you’ve made your selection, go ahead and click the “Import slides” button to import the pages into your existing presentation.
And now pages one and four of the PDF have become slides two and three in the presentation, and they’re mixed in with the existing slides.
And, if you want to rearrange them, you can easily do that by just dragging the slide you want to move up or down.
And that’s all there is to it! So whether you wanted to convert a PDF into a Google Slides presentation, merge it with an existing presentation, or insert one page of it into a slide of an existing presentation, you now know how it’s done.
If you want to learn how to open a PDF in Google Docs, I have an article about how to do that right here. Or, if you want to download a Google Slides presentation as a PDF, you can click here to learn how to do that.
