I have been working on a web translation project but the translated text was supplied to me in PowerPoint format. I do not relish the idea of copy and pasting text from each slide to get it into text format for further manipulation so there had to be an easier way.

I could also do with a word count. To get a word count directly out of PowerPoint you need to navigate to the Office Icon then select:

• Prepare
• Properties
• Document Properties
• Advanced Properties
• On the dialog box displayed – select Statistics
• The Word count is displayed in the Statistics section

There were two ways I could find to get the text out of PowerPoint:

Firstly, from within PowerPoint I could simply Save As, Other Formats, and select Outline/RTF as the format. This contains quite a bit of formatting information so I had to open this file into Word where I could manipulate the text.

The second method, and the simplest way I could find to get just the text out of PowerPoint was to select the Save As PDF option, this opened up Acrobat (which I have installed on my machine). From Acrobat I could select File, Save As, and change the Save As Type to Text (Plain) (*.txt).