My PowerPoint PDFs are cropped; footers, page numbers, dates are missing

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Problem

Footers, headers, dates, page numbers and sometimes slide content gets cropped when making PDFs from PowerPoint.

Solution

Some versions of Acrobat crop pages in PDFs made from PowerPoint.

The content is still there, you just need to uncrop the pages to reveal it:

• Open the PDF in Acrobat.
• Acrobat 5: Choose Document, Crop Pages.
  Acrobat 6: Choose Document, Pages, Crop
• Click Set to Zero
• Click All Pages
• Click OK

You should now see everything PowerPoint was supposed to print to PDF (and in fact did)

But better yet ...

Thanks to one of our readers (you know who you are, Doug) there's an even more useful suggestion, one that doesn't involve editing PDFs in Acrobat after you create them.

Another solution to cropped PDFs:

• Open your PowerPoint file
• Choose Tools, Options, and select the Print tab
• Uncheck the "Scale to fit paper" box
• Save your presentation to preserve this setting

As with everything that involves PowerPoint and PDF in the same sentence, your results may vary depending on the version of each of these applications you've installed.

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