Copy text from PowerPoint slides, including text in images

A PowerPoint deck stores its words in several places: title and bullet placeholders, text boxes someone drew, speaker notes, tables, and pictures that happen to contain text. Each comes out a different way. Here’s the fastest route for each, on a Mac, starting with the one that copies most of a deck in a single step.

All slide titles and bullets at once: Outline view

Outline view lists the text of every slide down the left side of the window, and you can copy it like a document.

1. Open the deck in PowerPoint for Mac.
2. Choose View → Outline, or click Outline View on the View tab of the ribbon.
3. Click anywhere in the outline pane, then press ⌘A and ⌘C.
4. Paste into Word, Pages, Notes or TextEdit. Each slide title arrives as a top-level line with its bullets indented underneath.

PowerPoint’s formatting comes along with the paste. For plain text, use Edit → Paste and Match Style (⌥⇧⌘V) instead.

The catch is what the outline leaves out. It only contains text in the layout’s placeholders, the boxes that say “Click to add title” or “Click to add text” on a fresh slide. Anything else stays out of the outline:

• text boxes inserted with Insert → Text Box
• shapes with text in them, WordArt and SmartArt
• charts and tables
• every slide built on the Blank layout, which has no placeholders at all

Decks made from a company template tend to use placeholders, so the outline catches nearly everything. Designer-made decks often use free text boxes, and the outline comes out half empty. If yours does, use the next section.

Text boxes, shapes and tables

For one box, click inside it, press ⌘A to select all the text in that box, and copy. Doing that across 40 slides is no fun, though, so for the whole deck go through a PDF:

1. Choose File → Export, pick PDF as the file format, and save.
2. Open the PDF in Preview and select text page by page, or choose Edit → Select All to take everything.

Text boxes come out as real text this way. On busy slides the reading order can jump around, with a caption landing before the heading it belongs to, so skim the result.

Tables are easier than they look. Click the table’s border to select the whole table, copy it, and paste into Excel or Numbers: the cells stay cells. A table that someone pasted in as a picture is a different story; see copying a table from a slide.

Speaker notes

For one slide, click Notes in the status bar under the slide to show the notes pane, click into the notes, and press ⌘A then ⌘C.

For every slide at once, print the Notes layout, which Microsoft documents for PowerPoint for Mac, to a PDF instead of paper:

1. Choose File → Print.
2. Under the PowerPoint options, set Layout to Notes.
3. Open the PDF menu at the bottom of the dialog and choose Save as PDF.

Each page of that PDF shows a slide thumbnail with its notes underneath, as selectable text. The same dialog’s Outline layout prints only the slide text, without pictures, which is handy if you want the outline as a file rather than on the clipboard.

Text inside pictures and screenshots on slides

Screenshots of a dashboard, a scanned page, a photo of a whiteboard: once they’re on a slide, their words are pixels. PowerPoint doesn’t read text in pictures, so you need a tool that does.

1. Control-click the picture and choose Save as Picture…, or select it and press ⌘C.
2. Open the saved file in Preview, or in Preview choose File → New from Clipboard if you copied it.
3. Hover over the words until the pointer becomes a text cursor, drag to select, and copy.

Before you go to that trouble, check the picture’s alt text: Control-click it and look for the alt text command. Careful authors type the important words from an image there, and you can copy them straight out of the pane.

When the deck arrived as a PDF or slide images

Often you don’t get the .pptx at all, only a PDF someone exported, or a deck flattened into slide images. Open the PDF in Preview and try to select a line:

• It selects: the PDF kept the text. Copy as usual.
• Nothing selects: every slide is an image. Preview can add a text layer: choose File → Export and select Embed Text. Apple notes the option only appears when Preview hasn’t found any text in the document yet. After that, the slides select like a normal PDF.

In Unpixel

When a picture on a slide is all you need, Unpixel saves the export-and-open dance. Press ⇧⌘2 with the slide on screen, drag over the picture, and let go: its words are on your clipboard. The same works while the deck is playing in a meeting you’re watching on a screen share.

For a flattened deck, click Open Image… in Unpixel’s menu bar panel and choose the PDF. Up to 50 pages are read in one go, so a 30-slide deck turns into text in a single step. A table that sits on a slide as a picture pastes into Numbers or Excel as real cells.

Keynote users

Keynote has the same tools under slightly different names, and it opens .pptx files, so it also works if you don’t have Office.

• Outline: click the View button in the toolbar and choose Outline. The sidebar turns into a text outline of each slide’s title and bullets; click into it, select all, and copy.
• Presenter notes: click View in the toolbar and choose Show Presenter Notes, then copy from the notes field under the slide.
• Free text boxes: like PowerPoint, Keynote’s outline only shows title and body text, so export a PDF for the rest.

Quick checklist

• Titles and bullets: View → Outline, ⌘A, ⌘C.
• Text boxes and shapes: export to PDF, then select in Preview.
• Speaker notes: File → Print, Layout: Notes, save as PDF.
• Words in a picture: Live Text in Preview, or ⇧⌘2 with Unpixel.
• Flattened PDF deck: Preview’s Embed Text, or open it in Unpixel.