Exporting Handouts or Notes Pages to Word

One of the drawbacks to PowerPoint is that the notes and handouts pages are not fully formattable. There's a lot you can't do with them-such as set margins, or change the sizes of the slide images for handouts. To get around this, you might want to create your handouts in Microsoft Word. To send your presentation to Word, follow these steps:

1. Choose Office Publish Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word. The Send to Microsoft Office Word dialog box appears as shown in Figure 19.13.

   
   Figure 19.13: Choose a format for sending the presentation to Word.

2. Choose one of the formats shown in Figure 19.13. You can send to Word in a variety of formats. Some formats are more appropriate for handouts, others for speaker notes. Here are some suggestions:

   Open table as spreadsheet

   For Handouts	For Speaker Notes
   Blank Lines Next to Slides	Notes Next to Slides
   Blank Lines Below Slides	Notes Below Slides
   Outline Only	Outline Only

3. (Optional) If you want to maintain a link between the PowerPoint file and the Word file, choose Paste Link. Otherwise, leave Paste selected. If you maintain a link, then the changes you make to the PowerPoint file are reflected in the Word file.

4. Click OK. Word opens and the slides appear in the format you chose. See Figure 19.14.

   
   Figure 19.14: With the notes pages or handouts in Word, you can change the margins and other settings.

5. Modify the formatting as desired, and then print from Word.

6. (Optional) Save your work in Word if you want to print the same pages again later. (You may choose to resend to Word later, after making changes in PowerPoint instead.)

Note 

The slides appear in Word in a table (if you chose a Next to Slides option), but without visible gridlines showing. You can resize (or even delete) the columns for each element by dragging the column dividers, just like you do in a table in PowerPoint.

Changing the Margins in Word

One benefit of exporting handouts to Word is being able to change the margins. In Word, on the Page Layout tab, click the Margins button, and choose a margin preset or choose Custom Margins.

However, note that changing the page margins does not resize the table. If you change the left margin, the table may start at a different place in relation to the left margin (because the table is left-aligned), but if you want to increase the margins so that you can increase the table width, those are two separate activities.

You can also set internal margins in the cells in a table. To do so, on the Table Tools Layout tab, click Cell Margins.

Change the Table Alignment

The table itself has a default alignment in relationship to the page: Top left. If you prefer the look of a centered table, you may want to switch this:

• To make the table horizontally centered on the page, select the table as a whole. To do this, click the square above and to the left of the table with the four-headed arrow in it. Then use the Center button on the Home tab (Paragraph group) to center it. Note that this does not center the text within the cells; this refers only to the table.

• To vertically center the table on the page, you need to set the vertical alignment for the document. To do so, on the Page Layout tab in Word, click the dialog box launcher in the Page Setup group, and on the Layout tab in the Page Setup dialog box, set the vertical alignment to Center.

Change Alignment Within a Cell

To center the content within a cell horizontally, click in that cell and then on the Table Tools Layout tab, click the Middle Center button (or any of the other buttons that are combinations of vertical and horizontal alignment) as shown in Figure 19.15.

Figure 19.15: Set table alignment from the Table Tools Layout tab.

Resize Rows and Columns

To resize a column, drag the border between that column and the one to its right. When the mouse pointer is over a column border, it changes to a double-headed arrow with a line between the arrows. Alternatively you can specify an exact size by clicking in the column, and then on the Table Tools Layout tab, set a value in the Cell Size group. Do the same for row heights. For a better look at the gridlines, on the Table Tools Format tab, enable View Gridlines. These appear only on-screen; they will not print.

Note 

You cannot resize a row or column to the point that its text content no longer fits. (And the lines for the audience to write on are comprised of underline characters, which are considered text.) Therefore, you may need to resize the content or even delete some of it. For example, if you use a layout that includes blank lines, you'll get several blank lines in some of the cells. To make these cells narrower, you need to decrease the length of the lines first. To make these cells shorter, you may need to delete one or more of the lines.

Turn On/Off Cell Borders

By default, all borders are turned off for all cells in the table. You can turn them on in a variety of ways, but perhaps the easiest is to select one or more cells, and then use the Borders button on the Table Tools Design tab. Choose the button that has no borders (all dotted lines) to turn all borders off again.

Figure 19.16: The Borders button has a drop-down list of border sides to turn on/off.

Note 

One thing to note about these borders is that whatever you choose applies to the selected range, not to the individual cells. For example, suppose you choose a range of cells that contains three rows and you apply a bottom border. The border would be applied only to the bottom of the bottom row of cells.

Apply a Background

To apply a background to the entire page, use the Page Color button on the Page Layout tab in Word. A palette of colors appears. The choices are much the same as in PowerPoint.

EXPERT TIP 

Word 2007 uses the same themes as PowerPoint. You can apply a theme to the document in Word to make it match the formatting of the presentation in PowerPoint.

To apply a background to only certain cells, select the cells and then on the Table Tools Design tab, click the Shading button and select a color. This is a lot like applying a fill color in PowerPoint.

Resize the Graphics

Resizing the slide images is one of the most common reasons why people export PowerPoint handouts to Word. Each image is resizable individually, so they need not necessarily be the same size (although it usually looks better if they are).

If you want to make the slides larger, you can first increase the column width for the column in which they reside. Then drag the selection handles on the slide thumbnail to resize.

Note 

If you want to resize all of the slide images and you want them all to be the same size, set the table column width to the width you want for the images and then resize each picture as large as it can be while still fitting in that column. Unfortunately you cannot resize multiple images as a batch.