Creating Handouts


To create handouts, you simply decide on a layout (a number of slides per page) and then choose that layout from the Print dialog box as you print. No muss, no fuss! If you want to get more involved, you can edit the layout in Handout Master view before printing.

Choosing a Layout

Assuming you have decided that handouts are appropriate for your speech, you must decide on the format for them. You have a choice of one, two, three, four, six, or nine slides per page.

  • 1: Places a single slide vertically and horizontally "centered" on the page.

  • 2: Prints two big slides on each page. This layout is good for slides that have a lot of fine print and small details or for situations where you are not confident that the reproduction quality will be good. There is nothing more frustrating for an audience than not being able to read the handouts!

  • 3: Makes the slides much smaller-less than one-half the size of the ones in the two-slide layout. But you get a nice bonus with this layout: lines to the side of each slide for note-taking. This layout works well for presentations where the slides are big and simple, and the speaker is providing a lot of extra information that isn't on the slides. The audience members can write the extra information in the note-taking space provided.

  • 4: Uses the same size slides as the three-slide layout, but they are spaced out two-by-two without note-taking lines. However, there is still plenty of room above and below each slide, so the audience members still have lots of room to take notes.

  • 6: Uses slides the same size as the three-slide and four-slide layouts, but crams more slides on the page at the expense of note-taking space. This layout is good for presentation with big, simple slides where the audience does not need to take notes. If you are not sure if the audience will benefit at all from handouts being distributed, consider whether this layout would be a good compromise. This format also saves paper, which might be an issue if you need to make hundreds of copies.

  • 9: Makes the slides very tiny, almost like a Slide Sorter view, so that you can see nine at a time. This layout makes them very hard to read unless the slide text is extremely simple. I don't recommend this layout in most cases, because the audience really won't get much out of such handouts.

EXPERT TIP 

One good use for the nine-slides model is as an index or table of contents for a large presentation. You can include a nine-slides-per-page version of the handouts at the beginning of the packet that you give to the audience members, and then follow it up with a two-slides-per-page version that they can refer to if they want a closer look at one of the slides.

Finally, there is an Outline handout layout, which prints an outline of all of the text in your presentation-that is, all of the text that is part of placeholders in slide layouts; any text in extra text boxes you have added manually is excluded. It is not considered a handout when you are printing, but it is included with the handout layouts in the Handout Master. More on this type of handout later in the chapter.

Printing Handouts

When you have decided which layout is appropriate for your needs, print your handouts as follows:

  1. (Optional) If you want to print only one particular slide, or a group of slides, select the ones you want in either Slide Sorter view or in the slide thumbnails task pane on the left.

  2. Select Office image from book Print. The Print dialog box appears.

  3. Set options for your printer or choose a different printer. See the "Setting Printer-Specific Options" section later in this chapter for help with this.

  4. In the Print Range area, choose one of the following:

    • All to print the entire presentation.

    • Current Slide to print whatever slide you selected before you issued the Print command.

    • Selection to print multiple slides you selected before you issued the Print command. It is not available if you did not select any slides beforehand.

    • Custom Show to print a certain custom show you have set up. It is not available if you do not have any custom shows.

    • Slides to print the slide numbers that you type in the accompanying text box. Indicate a contiguous range with a dash. For example, to print slides 1 through 9, type 1-9. Indicate noncontiguous slides with commas. For example, to print slides, 2, 4, and 6, type 2, 4, 6. Or to print slides 2 plus 6 through 10, type 2, 6-10. To print them in reverse order, type the order that way, such as 10-6, 2.

  5. Enter a number of copies in the Number of Copies text box. The default is 1. If you want the copies collated (applicable to multipage printouts only), make sure you mark the Collate check box.

  6. Open the Print What drop-down list and choose Handouts. The Handouts section of the box becomes available, as shown in Figure 19.1.

    image from book
    Figure 19.1: Choose Handouts to print and specify which handout layout you want.

    Note 

    If you want to print an outline, choose Outline View instead of Handouts in step 6, and then skip steps 7–9. An outline can be a useful handout for an audience in certain situations.

  7. Open the Slides Per Page drop-down list and choose the number of slides per page you want.

  8. If available, choose an Order: Horizontal or Vertical. Not all number-of-slide choices (from step 7) support an Order choice.

    Note 

    Order in step 8 refers to the order in which the slides are placed on the page. Horizontal places them by rows, and Vertical places them by columns. This ordering has nothing to do with the orientation of the paper (Portrait or Landscape). You set the paper orientation in the Page Setup dialog box (Design image from book Page Setup).

  9. Open the Color/Grayscale drop-down list and select the color setting for the printouts:

    • Color: Sends the data to the printer assuming that color will be used. When you use this setting with a black-and-white printer, it results in slides with grayscale or black backgrounds. Use this setting if you want the handouts to look as much as possible like the on-screen slides.

    • Grayscale: Sends the data to the printer assuming that color will not be used. Colored backgrounds are removed, and if text is normally a light color on a dark background, that is reversed. Use this setting if you want PowerPoint to optimize the printout for viewing on white paper.

    • Pure Black and White: This format hides most shadows and patterns, as described in Table 19.1. It's good for faxes and overhead transparencies.

      Table 19.1: Differences Between Grayscale and Pure Black and White
      Open table as spreadsheet

      Object

      Grayscale

      Pure Black and White

      Text

      Black

      Black

      Text Shadows

      Grayscale

      Black

      Fill

      Grayscale

      Grayscale

      Lines

      Black

      Black

      Object Shadows

      Grayscale

      Black

      Bitmaps

      Grayscale

      Grayscale

      Clip Art

      Grayscale

      Grayscale

      Slide Backgrounds

      White

      White

      Charts

      Grayscale

      White

    EXPERT TIP 

    To see what your presentation will look like when printed to a black-and-white printer, on the View tab click Grayscale or Pure Black and White. If you see an object that is not displaying the way you want, right-click it and choose Grayscale or Black and White. One of the options there may help you achieve the look you're after.

  10. Mark any desired check boxes at the bottom of the dialog box:

    • Scale to Fit Paper: Enlarges the slides to the maximum size they can be and still fit on the layout (as defined in the Handout Master, covered later in this chapter).

    • Frame Slides: Draws a black border around each slide image. Useful for slides being printed with white backgrounds.

    • Print Comments: Prints any comments that you have inserted with the Comments feature in PowerPoint (covered in Chapter 23).

    • Print Hidden Slides: Includes hidden slides in the printout. This option is not available if you don't have any hidden slides in your presentation.

    • High Quality: Optimizes the appearance of the printout in small ways, such as allowing text shadows to print.

  11. (Optional) Click the Preview button to see a preview of your handouts; then click the Print button to return to the Print dialog box.

  12. Click OK. The handouts print, and you're ready to roll!

Caution 

Beware of the cost of printer supplies. If you are planning to distribute copies of the presentation to a lot of people, it may be tempting to print all of the copies on your printer. But the cost per page of printing is fairly high, especially if you have an inkjet printer. You will quickly run out of ink in your ink cartridge and have to spend $20 or more for a replacement. Consider whether it might be cheaper to print one original and take it to a copy shop.

Setting Printer-Specific Options

In addition to the controls in the Print dialog box in PowerPoint, there are controls you can set that affect the printer you have chosen. In the Printer section of the Print dialog box, you can open the Name drop-down list and choose the printer you want to use to print the job, as shown in Figure 19.2. Most home users have only one printer, but business users may have more than one to choose from, especially on a network.

Note 

Some of the "printers" listed are not really physical printers but drivers that create other types of files. For example, Microsoft XPS Document Writer saves a file in XPS format, which is Microsoft's version of a PostScript-type format.

After choosing a printer, you can click the Properties button to display its Properties dialog box. The properties shown are different for different kinds of printers. Figure 19.2 shows the box for my Lexmark Optra S 1855 printer, a color laser printer. Notice that there are six tabs: Layout, Paper/Quality, Output Options, Watermark, Profiles, and About. The tabs may be different for your printer.

image from book
Figure 19.2: Select a printer if you have more than one.

image from book
Figure 19.3: Each printer's options are slightly different, but the same types of settings are available on most printers.

These settings affect how the printer behaves in all Windows-based programs, not just in PowerPoint, so you need to be careful not to change anything that you don't want globally changed. Here are some of the settings you may be able to change on your printer:

  • Orientation: You can choose between Portrait and Landscape. It's not recommended that you change this setting here, though; make such changes in the Page Setup dialog box in PowerPoint instead. Otherwise, you may get the wrong orientation on a printout in other programs.

  • Page Order: You can choose Front to Back or Back to Front. This determines the order the pages print.

  • Pages Per Sheet: The default is 1, but you can print smaller versions of several pages on a single sheet. This option is usually only available on PostScript printers.

  • Paper Size: The default is Letter, but you can change to Legal, A4, or any of several other sizes.

  • Paper Source: If your printer has more than one paper tray, you may be able to select Upper or Lower.

  • Copies: This sets the default number of copies that should print. Be careful; this number is a multiplier. If you set two copies here, and then set two copies in the Print dialog box in PowerPoint, you end up with four copies.

  • Graphics Resolution: If your printer has a range of resolutions available, you may be able to choose the resolution you want. My printer lets me choose between 300 and 600 dots per inch (dpi); on an inkjet printer, choices are usually 360, 720, and 1,440 dpi. Achieving a resolution of 1,440 on an inkjet printer usually requires special glossy paper.

  • Graphic Dithering: On some printers, you can set the type of dithering that makes up images. Dithering is a method of creating shadows (shades of gray) from black ink by using tiny crosshatch patterns. You may be able to choose between Coarse, Fine, and None.

  • Image Intensity: On some printers, you can control the image appearance with a light/dark slide bar.

Some printers, notably inkjets, come with their own print-management software. If that's the case, you may have to run that print-management software separately from outside of PowerPoint for full control over the printer's settings. You can usually access such software from the Windows Start menu.

Using the Handout Master

Just as the Slide Master controls your slide layout, the Handout Master controls your handout layout. To view the Handout Master, on the View tab click Handout Master, as shown in Figure 19.4. Unlike the Slide Master and Title Master, you can have only one Handout Master layout per presentation.

image from book
Figure 19.4: The Handout Master lets you define the handout layout to be printed.

You can do almost exactly the same things with the Handout Master that you can with the Slide Master. The following sections describe some of the common activities.

Setting the Number of Slides Per Page

You can view the Handout Master with various numbers of slides per page to help you see how the layout will look when you print it. However, the settings are not different for each number of slides per page; for example, if you apply a header or footer, or page background, for a three-slides-per-page layout, it also applies to all the others as well. To choose the number of slides per page to display as you work with the Handout Master, click the Slides Per Page button and then make your selection from its menu. See Figure 19.5.

image from book
Figure 19.5: Choose a number of slides per page.

Using and Positioning Placeholders

The Handout Master has four placeholders by default: Header, Footer, Date, and Page Number, in the four corners of the handout respectively:

  • Header: Appears in the upper-left corner, and is a blank box into which you can type fixed text that will appear on each page of the printout.

  • Footer: Same thing as Header but appears in the lower-left corner.

  • Date: Appears in the upper-right corner, and shows today's date by default.

  • Page Number: Appears in lower-right corner and shows a code for a page number <#>. This will be replaced by an actual page number when you print.

In each placeholder box, you can type text (replacing, if desired, the Date and Page codes already there in those). You can also drag the placeholder boxes around on the layout.

There are two ways to remove the default placeholders from the layout. You select the placeholder box and press Delete, or you can clear the check box for that element on the Handout Master tab as shown in Figure 19.6.

image from book
Figure 19.6: Turn on/off placeholder elements from the Handout Master tab.

Note 

Because the header and footer are blank by default, there is no advantage to deleting these placeholders unless they have something in them you want to dispose of; having a blank box and having no box at all have the same result.

EXPERT TIP 

You can't move or resize the slideplaceholder boxes on the Handout Master, nor can you change its margins. If you want to change the size of the slide boxes on the handout or change the margins of the page, consider exporting the handouts to Word and working on them there. See the section "Exporting Handouts or Notes Pages to Word" at the end of this chapter for more information.

Setting Handout and Slide Orientation

Orientation refers to the direction on the page the material runs. If the top of the paper is one of the narrow edges, it's called Portrait; if the top of the paper is a wide edge, it's Landscape. Figure 19.7 shows the difference in handout orientation.

image from book
Figure 19.7: Portrait (left) and Landscape (right) handout orientation.

You can also set an orientation for the slides themselves on the handouts. This is a separate setting that does not affect the handout page in terms of the placement of the header, footer, and other repeated elements. Figure 19.8 shows the difference between portrait and landscape slide orientation on a portrait handout.

image from book
Figure 19.8: Landscape (left) and Portrait (right) slide orientation.

To set either of these orientations, use their respective drop-down lists on the Handout Master tab, in the Page Setup group. See Figure 19.9.

image from book
Figure 19.9: Set orientation from the Page Setup group.

Formatting Handouts

You can manually format any text on a handout layout using the formatting controls on the Home tab, the same as with any other text. Such formatting affects only the text you select, and only on the layout you're working with. You can also select the entire placeholder box and apply formatting.

You can also apply Colors, Fonts, and/or Effects themes from the Edit Theme group, as shown in Figure 19.10, much like you can do for the presentation as a whole. The main difference is that you cannot select an overall theme from the Themes button; all the themes are unavailable from the list while in Handout Master view. The settings you apply here affect only the handouts, not the presentation as a whole.

image from book
Figure 19.10: Apply color, font, and/or effect themes from the Edit Theme group.

Note 

You probably won't have much occasion to apply an Effects theme to a handout layout because handouts do not usually have objects that use effects (i.e., drawn shapes, charts, or SmartArt diagrams).




Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Bible
Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 Bible
ISBN: 0470144939
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 268
Authors: Faithe Wempen

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net