Printing Notes

Speaker notes can be used for a variety of reasons. One obvious purpose is to provide the speaker with reference material, or cues about what to say or do during a slide presentation. Another, however, is to provide written comments intended for the audience. Because notes don't display during the presentation, you provide them in printed format.

PowerPoint assumes that you want to provide notes along with the slides they describe. This makes sense, but it also limits your flexibility in how you print them out. By default, PowerPoint prints one slide and its notes per printed page.

To see quickly what a notes page looks like, choose View, Notes Page. PowerPoint shows a whole-page view, including the slide, the notes, and a page number (see Figure 17.5). To return to the Normal view, click the Normal View icon or choose View, Normal.

Figure 17.5. The Notes view shows what printed notes look like.

When you access the Print dialog box (refer to Figure 17.1) under Print What you can choose Notes Pages. However, that gives you only one slide and set of notes per page, which is the same as what you see in the Notes view.

Within PowerPoint there really is no way to print a list of speaker notes, without slides, or combine several notes on a page. However, you can do better than one per page by sending a slide show to Word. Follow these steps:

1. Save the slide show. What you're about to do opens Word and therefore brings the possibility of program crashes and lost data.

2. Choose File, Send To, Microsoft Word. PowerPoint displays the Send to Microsoft Word dialog box (see Figure 17.6). You have two options for formatting notes:

   Figure 17.6. Sending a slide show to Microsoft Word provides flexible formatting options that are not available in PowerPoint.

   

   • The third option in the dialog box, Notes Below Slides, is the same as the one you find in PowerPoint's Print dialog box half the page contains the slide, and the bottom half contains any notes.

   • The first option, Notes Next to Slides, places a small version of the slide at the left, with notes at the right. This is a better use of paper and is typically easier to manage when you use notes during a presentation.

3. Choose a notes format, such as Notes Next to Slides, and click OK. PowerPoint opens Microsoft Word, creates a three-column table, and places a slide number, slide, and its notes on each row (see Figure 17.7).

One advantage to sending a slide show to a Word document is that you can edit the results in Word. For example, if you choose the one-slide-per-page option, in Word you can then delete slide images and page breaks, thus leaving a numbered list of speaker notes (see Figure 17.8).

Figure 17.7. If you want small printed slides along with notes, you can send a slide show to Microsoft Word.

Figure 17.8. In Microsoft Word you can delete slide pictures, leaving just the slide numbers and printed speaker notes.