Convert PPT to HTML
An old .ppt is difficult to open, awkward to circulate and invisible to search. Converting it to a page fixes all three at once: anyone with a browser can read it, the text becomes findable, and a file that depended on software from two decades ago becomes markup that will still render in twenty more.
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Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- All slides are included, in order
- Text becomes real, searchable text rather than a binary nobody can index
- Fonts may substitute, which can change where lines break
How to use PPT to HTML
- 1
Upload the .ppt
Any legacy binary deck. Every slide appears in the output.
- 2
Slides become sections of a page
Text boxes become text, images are extracted, and the deck reads top to bottom in a browser.
- 3
Compare against the original once
Old decks were laid out around fonts that may no longer exist, so check any slide with tightly-fitted text.
How it works
The compound binary is opened, its slides read in order, and each emitted as markup: text boxes become text, images are extracted and referenced, shapes are rendered or approximated. The output is a continuous document rather than a slideshow.
Why this is the conversion that rescues an old deck
Three problems disappear together. The file no longer needs specific software to open. The content becomes findable, by a browser's own search and by whatever indexes the site. And the deck stops depending on a format whose readers are slowly disappearing.
An archived .ppt that nobody can open is functionally lost, even though the bytes are safe. A page is readable by anything.
The font caveat, which matters more here than elsewhere
Decks of this era were laid out around typefaces that were installed at the time and frequently are not now. A substituted font has different letter widths, so lines break differently and carefully fitted text can overflow.
Every word survives. The exact composition may not, and there is usually no way to recover it short of finding and installing the original font.
What is not carried
Transitions, builds and timings, which have no meaning in a static document. Each slide arrives with all of its content visible, which for an archived deck being read rather than presented is generally an improvement.
If the appearance matters more than the text
Convert to PDF instead. It fixes the rendering as a set of pages, which preserves the original composition more faithfully, at the cost of the searchability and accessibility that make the HTML route worth choosing.
Making a twenty-year-old deck findable
The interesting part of this conversion is not the format change but what it does
to the content. A .ppt on a shared drive is invisible: no search engine indexes
it, site search does not see inside it, and nobody discovers it by accident.
As HTML the text becomes ordinary page content — searchable, linkable, quotable, readable on a phone, and available to a screen reader.
For an organization with an archive of old decks, that is usually worth more than anything the presentation itself does. A deck nobody can find is a deck that does not exist, and these files were made before anyone assumed content would need to be findable.
Examples
An archived seminar going onto an intranet
Colleagues can now find a slide by searching for a phrase instead of downloading a very large file and paging through it. The intranet search indexes it, which the binary never allowed.
A deck whose fonts are long gone
Every word is present, but the lines wrap differently than they did in 1999 because the original font was substituted. Content is safe; the exact layout is not.
Frequently asked questions
Does the whole deck come across?
Yes, every slide in order. A page has no length limit. This is the difference between converting to HTML and converting to an image, where PNG and JPG can only ever hold the first slide, because a single image file contains a single image.
Why does an old deck reflow?
Because it was laid out around the metrics of a font installed on a machine in the late 1990s or early 2000s. If that typeface is not available now, a substitute is used, and a substitute has different letter widths, so lines break in different places and text that fitted its box may not. There is no way around it other than installing the original font, which is usually not possible.
Is the text really searchable afterwards?
Yes, and this is the strongest reason to convert an archived deck. The words become characters in the markup, so a browser can find them, an intranet or search engine can index them, and assistive software can read them aloud. In the binary they were locked inside a format almost nothing can parse, which is why old decks tend to be forgotten rather than reused.