Export all the text from a PPT presentation to a Word document - PPT 2019

Here are two methods to export text from a PPT presentation to Word. Please keep in mind that all the text is not to be interpreted to strictly. Text in shapes, SmartArt, charts is not included. If you have text in text boxes only method 2 will work.

Method 1 : export presentation to rich text format using save as (*.rft).

Go to File and choose Save as, select the folder where you want to save, click on the list arrow next to save as and choose Outline/RTF (*.rtf) in the list, finally click on Save. You can also go to File and choose Export and click the Save as button.

All of the text in placeholders is exported. Text in textboxes and shapes is not. Text keeps most of its formatting, things like text size, colour, bold, italics and so on. Be aware that white text on a dark background will not show in Word. You will have to select that text and apply black to it by using the font colour button.

You can see a five slides presentation below. Pay attention to slide 2 which has a rectangle with text. and a text box. Slide 3 has some white text in a placeholder. Slide 4 has three text boxes.

This is the result after exporting to Word:

Slide 1: no problem
Slide 2: only the title in the title placeholder is present
Slide 3: all of the text is present, the white text is not visible (the grey selected area)
Slide 4-5: no text has been exported

Method  2 : export presentation to a PDF-file and convert to text with Acrobat reader

Go to File and choose Export, Create PDF/XPS.

Give a name to your PDF file and choose the folder where it must be saved. Then click on the Publish button.

In Adobe Acrobat reader click File and choose Save as text.

Choose the folder and click Save, the file will be saved as a *.text file. This file can be opened in Word. In Word click the Open icon on the quick access tool bar, navigate to the folder, in the file type list choose text file (*.txt) or you will not see the file in the list.

In the conversion dialog that appears click the radio button Other encoding and choose the Unicode (UTF-8) option, click OK.

As you can see in the screenshot below text is exported without formatting. Every slide has generated an new page in Word. 

Text from the text boxes is present this time. No white text. As you can see much formatting is lost, on top of that the text has a lot of unwanted returns. There is a lot to be done. See a screenshot of pages 3 and 4 below:

You can also choose the radio button Windows (default) but in my language (Dutch) that resulted in many unreadable characters.

If you have the Acrobat pro version you can opt to export to Word, Excel or PowerPoint directly.