Greetings -
I consider myself to be a PowerPoint power user and was very interested to hear that Adobe XI is able to export a PDF to a PPTX. A colleauge of mine downloaded a free trail version of Adobe XI so we could play around with this feature and I have to admit that I was very disappointed with the results, especially given the statements on these web pages:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdf-to-powerpoint-pptx-converter .html
NEW Spend less time reformatting
When you convert your PDF to PowerPoint, your formats are saved, too — so you'll spend far less time reformatting bulleted text, tables, objects, and master layouts.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/word-to-pdf-converter.html
Preserve more than your look and layout
Smarter than your average PDF, the PDFs you create with Acrobat remember all the formatting information contained in your Office files. So it's easy to convert them back to Office files in the future.
To test this functionality, I made a fairly simple PPTX file and edited some of the content on slide layout / slide master, adding shadows, fancy fills, and different fonts to placeholder shapes. I also moved a few of the placeholder shapes around. This original PPTX can be found here:
http://home.comcast.net/~bellert/master_layout_edits.pptx
Using the PDF writer integrated into Office, we then saved the PPTX as a PDF. That document can be found here:
http://home.comcast.net/~bellert/master_layout_edits.pdf
Finally, using the trial version of Acrobat XI, we converted the PDF back to a PPTX. This round-trip document can be found here:
http://home.comcast.net/~bellert/master_layout_edits_RT.pptx
In comparing the original PPTX to the round-trip PPTX, I have to say the results are disappointing. A lot of the original text was lost and simply converted to uneditable images. The slide master pattern background was also replaced with an image. The single slide master title box placeholder shape was lost and replaced with 3 separate images. Overall, the formatting of the document, especially the master layouts, was not preserved at all in the PDF. This is not what I expected given the statements on the web pages referenced above. Does anybody have more specifics on exactly what PPTX formatting the PDF will preserve? I think this is a really nice feature, but so far it doesn't seem to be too effective.