Combine slides, PDFs and Word docs into one file for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini
A week of course material is almost never one file. There are a few ways to turn a folder of slides, readings and handouts into a single document a chatbot can work with, and they're good at different things.
# Source: heading with the file's name. Copy for AI puts the notes on the clipboard, ready to paste into a chatbot and ask about one file by name.Why one file
Free chatbot plans limit how many files you can attach. Sending one file instead of ten leaves your uploads for things that really need them, like scans (more on that in hitting the upload limit).
It also gives you one place to point at. When everything's in the same document, you can ask about a single file by name or about the whole week at once.
And you can check it. Plain text shows you exactly what the chatbot is reading. A slide deck doesn't.
Option 1: convert everything to one text document
Drop the files into CourseFeed. It takes PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel and CSV files, up to 20 files and 25 MB each. Each one is converted to plain text in your browser and joined into one Markdown document that looks like this:
# Source: Week 5 slides.pptx <!-- Slide number: 1 --> # Cell membranes ... --- # Source: Reading - Alberts ch. 10.pdf ...
Paste it into a chat, or download the .md file and attach it. For slides and readings this works best, because chatbots handle plain text more reliably than anything else. Tables in Word and Excel files come out as Markdown tables.
The file names become the headings, so it's worth renaming files before you convert them. "Week 5 slides.pptx" is a lot easier to ask about than "LEC05_final_v2.pptx".
Option 2: merge into one PDF
PDF tools can merge several PDFs into one, and PowerPoint and Word can save as PDF first. You keep the images and layout, which matters when the diagrams are important. The catch is that merged PDFs get big fast. Nothing marks where one file ends and the next begins, either, and scanned pages are still just pictures the chatbot has to read as images.
Option 3: copy and paste by hand
Opening each file and copying the text out is fine for two or three short files. For a whole week it's slow. Slide text often comes out in the wrong order, and tables usually lose their structure.
Which to use
- If it's mostly text (slides, readings, notes, handouts), convert it to one text document.
- If the diagrams matter, convert the text and attach the one or two key diagrams as images alongside it.
- Scans have no text to convert, so upload those separately. See scanned PDFs.