How to copy complex Objects from PowerPoint 2016 to Illustrator?

Question

I have rather complex PowerPoint 2016 objects with up to 100-300 polygons, rectangles, etc. nothing Illustrator should have problems with. Yet, when I try to copy paste, I get the following message:

"The operation cannot complete because of an unknown error."

Then I see like like 10-20 objects copied. Sometimes, I also got the "shadow" of the non-copied objects, but I wasn't able to reproduce that lately.

Stuff I tried already:

1) Ungrouping the Objects in PowerPoint and copying all of them together, instead of one grouped object.

2) Copying only about about 10 objects at a time, the problem is: a) this takes ages and b) the position is lost, thus I would have to rearrange everything.

The only work-around I found was exporting a pdf and then importing it in Illustrator, but that adds quite some baggage and also the grouping from PowerPoint gets lost.

MichaelStephens · Accepted Answer

You should be able to copy shapes from PowerPoint and paste them into Illustrator, but it's possible that the amount of shapes you've mentioned may be more than this method can handle simply because they were setup in PowerPoint. I don't trust PowerPoint for this reason as I've seen far too many weird things occur for other people that shouldn't be occurring.

However, what you can try is to select all the shapes in PowerPoint, right-click, select Save As Picture, and then select .eps or .wmf as the file type. You should then be able to use File > Place in Illustrator to import the file into Illustrator. Just know shapes with strokes will be two separate objects in your layers pallet.

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