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Keep your PowerPoint links

PowerPoint for Mac has an annoying habit. When it saves or exports a presentation to PDF, it drops the hyperlinks. The PDF looks exactly right, every slide is there, but the links no longer do anything when you click them.

If you sell on Teachers Pay Teachers this is the difference between a resource that works and one that gets a bad review. The links buyers care about are usually the ones back to your store, your terms of use, your credits, and any other products you link to. All of those go quiet in the exported PDF.

BearPDF can put them back, and here is how.

What BearPDF does and doesn’t do here

Section titled “What BearPDF does and doesn’t do here”

BearPDF is not a PowerPoint converter. It does not turn your .pptx into pages, and it does not add the slides to your document as another input file. You still export the PDF yourself from PowerPoint, the way you always have.

What you do is give BearPDF both files: the PDF you exported, and the original .pptx it came from. The .pptx is a side channel, not a second document. BearPDF reads the slide XML, finds where the links used to be and where they pointed, and injects those links back onto the matching pages of the finished PDF.

Section titled “Restore your links”

  1. In PowerPoint, export your presentation to PDF the way you normally do. Nothing changes here, and yes, the links will be missing from that PDF, which is expected.

  2. Open bearpdf.bearwoodlabs.com.

  3. Add the exported PDF, either with + Add PDFs or by dragging it onto the drop zone.

  4. Drop the original .pptx file in as well. This is the side channel BearPDF reads the links from.

  5. Check the chip that appears. It reads something like deck.pptx, restores hyperlinks lost in PDF export, 12 slides. That tells you BearPDF found the links and matched them to your pages.

  6. Run the pipeline as usual.

  7. Open the finished PDF. The links are back and clickable.

Restore, don’t clobber

Section titled “Restore, don’t clobber”

BearPDF only adds links to pages that don’t have any yet. If a page already kept its links, it is left alone. So if you feed in a PDF that somehow held onto its hyperlinks, nothing gets doubled up or overwritten.

This also plays nicely with Flatten. Link restore runs before watermark and flatten, so the restored links are baked in first and stay clickable on the flattened pages, the same as any other kept hyperlink.

For the full walkthrough of the rest of the pipeline, see Getting started with BearPDF.