PowerPoint is a key component of the Microsoft Office suite and is very widely used for giving business presentations. If you want your Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 presentation to go smoothly, it is important that the speaker knows what to say when each slide appears. One of the tools that can be used to help speakers achieve this is speaker notes. Speaker notes are simply paragraphs of text which can be entered for each slide in the presentation. Although their principal use is to act as a reminder and prompt for the speaker while giving the presentation, they can be used for a variety of purposes.

For one thing they can be used as an alternative to audience handouts. Naturally, this is only possible where the notes contain a summary of the information relevant to each slide rather than personal prompts such as “Remember to tell anecdote.” Secondly, they can be used during the development process to add reminders relevant to each slide. Before finalising the presentation, the creator(s) can then check the entries in the speaker notes to make sure that they have completed everything.

When speaker notes are being used for their intended purpose, they can of course be printed out and referred to as necessary. However, a more subtle approach is use a two-screen setup. Display the presentation on a large monitor while on your own computer, you can view the speaker notes.

There are two modes in which notes can be added and edited within PowerPoint. Firstly, in normal view, the speaker notes pane is displayed below the slide preview on the right of your screen. Simply click to position the cursor in the speaker notes pane and edited the notes as required. You can also drag the resize bar at the bottom of the workspace to increase the size of the speaker notes pane.

If you wish to focus on the notes themselves, in the View tab of the PowerPoint ribbon, click on the Notes Page View icon. This gives you a print preview of what your notes will look like when printed and allows you to edit the notes at the same time.

Finally, to control the appearance of the speaker notes when printed, you can customise the Notes Master. Masters are a feature of PowerPoint which allows you to customise the format of elements within a presentation by modifying a single master element. By default, the notes master features a miniature of the slide at the top of the page and the notes area at the bottom. It also features a header and footer, the date and page number. You can drag and resize these elements as you see fit. For example, you might make the slide smaller and increase the size of the notes text block or you might move the notes text above the slide.

The author is a trainer and computer consultant with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 training courses in London and throughout the UK.

Tags: computer tips, computer tutorials, computers, microsoft, PowerPoint

Audience handouts are a way of giving the attendees of your MS PowerPoint presentations something to remember you by. They normally consist of printouts of the presentation; one, two, three, four six or nine slides to a page. Naturally, however, whether or not the essence of your presentation can be captured by this kind of printout depends on the nature of the presentation.

To customise the appearance of handouts, click on the View tab of the PowerPoint ribbon and then click on the Handout Master button. In PowerPoint, masters allow you to determine the format of the three main elements within a presentation; slides, speaker notes and handouts. When you are in handout master mode, the Handout Master contextual tab appears. It contains a Page Setup section which allows you to choose the orientation of both the page as a whole and of the individual slide miniatures. It also contains buttons for activating or deactivating the header, footer, date and page number as well as for formatting the background of the slide.

Since PowerPoint can produce three separate elements (slides, speaker notes and handouts), when the print command is used, you need to specify which of these elements you wish to print. This is done by choosing an option from the Print What drop-down menu. In addition to the three elements mentioned above, you can also print the outline of the presentation.

For presentations containing a fair amount of important detail, it may be more useful to print out the slide outline and distribute it to the audience in place of PowerPoint’s usual handouts. Better still, you can export your presentation into Microsoft Word and then customise it for your audience. To export an outline, from the Office button, choose Publish and then Create Handouts in Microsoft Word.

When you use this command, you will be presented with a dialogue box which allows you to choose one of five page layout options. Firstly, you can have speaker notes next to slides. This will create a two column layout with a slide miniature in column one and speaker notes next to it in column two. If you have used the speaker notes feature in your presentation, this may be a useful solution. The second option is Blank Lines Next to Slides: this produces the same two column layout as the first option but the right hand column is blank, so that you can enter notes next to each slide.

The first two options don’t offer you much room for text. If you have made or wish to make extensive notes on each slide, options three and four (Notes below Slides and Blank lines below Slides) provide a layout with the text below the slide miniature and leaves approximately 60 percent of the page free for notes.

If you simply wish your audience to have a summary of the content of the presentation, you can choose the final option: Outline Only. This simply exports the text on each slide into Microsoft Word.

As is usually the case when transferring information from one MS Office 2007 application to another, you have the option of activating the Paste Link feature. This will create a link between the exported file and the original PowerPoint presentation, such that, if the presentation is modified, the exported Word file will also be updated.

The author is a trainer and IT consultant with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 training classes in London and throughout the UK.
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Tags: computer tips, computer tutorials, computers, microsoft, PowerPoint