Expert: Amy - 9/21/2006

Question
First off, I have Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Professional.

I have an Adobe Acrobat document that came in 60 different pages and I would like to pare each page out and put each of them individually into either a PowerPoint or onto Movie Maker (each on its own page).  Can you tell me how I can extract each page out of the document of 60?

Also, is there a way to extract just part of the page (for instance, a picture from the page?)  I'm afraid I don't know a lot about this software, obviously.

THANKS!

Answer
Hi Debbie,

That sounds like a nightmare task.

There's one way to do this right in Acrobat. Look for the snapshot tool in Tools > Basic > Snapshot Tool.  It's also located on the second tool bar, usually right next to the Select Text tool.  You use it to drag a rectangle around what you want to copy. When you release the mouse, it's copied to the clip board and can be pasted into PowerPoint.  Great for pictures but somewhat lacking when you want to copy whole pages because the resolution is screen.

The second method involves PhotoShop.  

If you have PhotoShop, I'd recommend opening the PDF file in PhotoShop.  Upon opening, you specify which page you want to open and at what resolution and color mode (RGB/Gray/CMYK). Basically, you'll be opening one page at time. I recommend RGB or grayscale at 144 dpi.  Usually fine for PowerPoint.  Test it and see what you think.

I say do it this way because of where it will end up (PowerPoint). A rasterized image of the page, in my opinion, will be nicer in a presentation than a page that contains vector images.

Once the page is open in PhotoShop, flatten the layers, then select all, copy and paste it onto your PowerPoint slide.

Then repeat 59 times =)

Using the same method, you can select portions of the page (like pictures you mentioned) and paste only that portion onto the PowerPoint slide.

If you need to edit the text within the pages, well, that's kind of a different story. Hopefully you don't need to?

There are also advanced editing tools in Acrobat 6. You have to look through the menus to find them.  Once again, when you select objects with these tools and copy them, the resolution will be low (72 dpi). Therefore, I find this PhotoShop method a lot quicker and more controllable.

Word of warning:
Depending on the typing skills of the creator, you might see some small artifacts when you do open the PDF page in PhotoShop.  Most frequently, a small square in place of soft carriage returns at the end of sentences; sometimes with tabbing, too.

Yet another option. I don't know if powerpoint allows you to import PDF documents directly these days. I doubt MovieMaker does. I own an old version of PP which doesn't.  If it does, and for future jobs you may encounter, it's possible to divide the 60 PDF pages into 60 1-page PDF documents using the Page Tools. Look under Document > Pages > Extract.  That's how you make individual pages.

Well, I hope this helps and the job goes smoothly.

-Amy