Setting Up Audience Handouts In MS PowerPoint 2007
Audience handouts are a way of giving the attendees of your 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 & 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 & 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 & of the individual slide miniatures. It also contains buttons for activating or deactivating the header footer date & page number as well as for formatting the background of the slide.
Since PowerPoint can produce three separate elements slides speaker notes & 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 form 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 & distribute it to the audience in place of PowerPoint’s usual handouts. Better still you can export your presentation into Microsoft Word & then customise it for your audience. To export an outline form Office button choose Publish & 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 & 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 & four Notes below Slides & Blank lines below Slides provide a layout with the text below the slide miniature & 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 & the original PowerPoint presentation such that if the presentation is modified the exported Word file will also be updated.
The author is trainer & IT consultant with Macresource Computer Training a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint classes in London & throughout the UK.