PowerPoint for Mac 2011 Export to PDF: Missing First Slide?

May 18, 2011 by AnaFxFz    1 Comment     Posted under: PowerPoint, Troubleshooting

PowerPoint for Mac 2011, although greatly improved, still has many flaws and issues that the Microsoft Office team needs to address. One of the known issues that many users have repeatedly encountered with the latest version of PowerPoint for Mac is that when you export your presentation as PDF, the first (title) slide is absent from the exported document.

It seems that saving the presentation as PDF through the print dialog in OS X fixes the problem but it also gives you a much “uglier” PDF – with a much lower resolution.

The problem with the missing title slide in the exported PDF occurs because the first slide is probably numbered as 0 (zero), so it gets deleted from the PDF document. The workaround is obviously to start with slide number 1. To change the slide number, in the insert menu, click “Slide Number”, which will prompt you to the “Header and Footer” options, where you should put the number 1 in the box “Starts at”.

Please note that even if you do not want to show slide numbers in your presentation, you can still use the “Header and Footer” options to change the slide number. Check the box “Slide Number”, change the number of the slide, uncheck the box “Slide Number”, and click “Apply”.

I hope this helps! ;)