How to Convert a PowerPoint PPTX to PDF in Power Automate

PowerPoint is a great presentation tool — but as far as MS Office file formats go, it’s not ideally suited for large scale sharing. PPTX files can get very large and cumbersome, especially those with dozens of slides containing image objects, built-in vector graphics, and other multimedia content.

By converting our PowerPoints to PDF, we can reduce the file size of our presentations and make them easier to distribute. It’s especially useful to do make this conversion for slide decks, reports, and other content we’ll expect a wide audience to view and save.

Convert PowerPoints to PDF in Power Automate

While it’s easy enough to manually export individual PowerPoints as PDFs when we need to, making the PPTX to PDF conversion at scale brings in a new set of challenges. Thankfully, Power Automate makes it easy to approach and resolve challenges like these at scale.

In Power Automate, we can easily convert PowerPoints to PDF using the Cloudmersive Document Conversion connector. We can convert entire folders full of PowerPoint documents to PDF all at once — and we’ll demonstrate that in a quick example flow right now.

We’ll build a manually triggered instant cloud flow that pulls three PowerPoint files from the same folder in our system, converts them to PDF, and stores the new PDFs in a subfolder.

Since we’re pulling from a OneDrive folder in this demo, we’ll start by using a List files in folder action to enumerate details about each PowerPoint in our target folder.

Next, we’ll use a Get file content action to grab file bytes for each presentation in our folder. We’ll use the Id (unique identifier) value retrieved in our previous step.

Within the For each control that Power Automate created to deal with the Id array, we’ll now add a new action and search for Cloudmersive connectors.

We’ll find a list of several Cloudmersive connectors available in the Power Automate connector library; we’re looking for the Document Conversion connector with the green logo.

To find the PPTX to PDF conversion action we want, we’ll click “See more” to view the full actions list, and from there, we’ll search for an action titled Convert PowerPoint PPTX Presentation to PDF.

At this point, we’ll need to create our Document Conversion connection in Power Automate.

Like any third-party connector, we’ll need a premium Power Automate license to access this resource — but we can use it for free with a free Cloudmersive API key. These allow a limit of 800 API calls per month, and they’re obtainable when we create a free account on the Cloudmersive website (for reference, I’m using a free API key in this walkthrough).

After we’ve created and authorized our Document Conversion connection, we’ll provide our file bytes and file name in each of our two request parameters.

Next, we’ll add a Create file action and save our new PDF presentations in a new folder. We’ll use OutputContent from our Convert PowerPoint to PDF action to create our new files.

As a side note, we can use the Name without extension value from our List files in folder action to dynamically retain the same name as our original PPTX while changing the extension to PDF.

At this point, we’ll save our flow and run a test.

When our test is complete, we’ll find the PDF versions of our presentations in our target folder. Each file should be significantly smaller than its original PPTX version, making it easier to share around and outside of our system.