As you know, I do basically everything with LaTeX. But, I have colleagues who work with other tools and sometimes we exchange slides. Fortunately by now people have realized that I don’t like to get weird formats, so they send me pdfs. Yay!

It is actually really easy to include pages from a presentation in pdf format into a LaTeX beamer presentation. You will need the package pdfpages and then just write:

{
\setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=}
\includepdf[pages=3-8]{slides.pdf}
}

The first line is necessary, because it seems like otherwise the pdf slides end up being inserted behind the background of the slides, which doesn’t make so much sense to me, but anyway.

You can also include one pdf page into a beamer-slide (“frame”). This is useful if you want to edit the slide a bit, for example to hack your own footer back into the slide to get consistent page numbering:

{
\setbeamercolor{background canvas}{bg=}
\begin{frame}[t]
\includepdf[pages=3]{slides.pdf}

\vspace{0.81\paperheight} % go down to where we want the footer

\hspace*{0.31\paperwidth} % space to the left
\begin{minipage}{0.6\paperwidth} % insert my footer
\tiny\colorbox{white}{~\insertshortauthor: \insertshorttitle} 
\hfill \insertframenumber ~/ \inserttotalframenumber
\end{minipage}

\end{frame}
}