Print in PowerPoint Online

Yes, PowerPoint Online has fewer options compared to desktop versions of PowerPoint. You cannot export videos, and there’s no feature to control interface elements. However, basic options exist within Backstage View that let you accomplish basic tasks such as sharing, saving, printing, and downloading, etc. In this tutorial, we will explore the Print option.

Click the File tab of the Ribbon. This brings up the Backstage View in PowerPoint Online as shown in Figure 1. Select the Print Pane (highlighted in blue within Figure 1).

Figure 1: Print Pane of the Backstage View
Within the Print pane, click the Print option (highlighted in red within Figure 1). Depending upon your browser, you may see a regular Print dialog box, as shown in Figure 2, below. Change settings as needed, and click the Print button to print your slides to a connected physical or virtual printer. This is the behavior we witnessed when we signed into PowerPoint Online using Google Chrome as the browser, at the time of writing this tutorial.

Figure 2: Print dialog box in PowerPoint Online

Alternatively, you may see a message window that indicates that the file is being converted to PDF format as shown in Figure 3. When we used Mozilla Firefox, PowerPoint Online’s printing solutions were limited to creating print-ready PDFs.

Figure 3: Converting to PDF
Once the conversion process is over, PowerPoint Online brings up a message window as shown in Figure 4. Click the Open PDF option (highlighted in red within Figure 4).

Figure 4: PDF is ready to print
This opens the converted PDF in a new tab within the browser. as shown in Figure 5. Click the Print button (highlighted in red within Figure 5).

Figure 5: PowerPoint file saved as PDF
This brings up the Print dialog box as shown in Figure 6. Within this dialog box, change the settings as required and click the OK button.

Figure 6: Print Dialog box