Getting Familiar with the Notes Pane

Quick reference

• 00:05 Have you ever been halfway through delivering a presentation and you think yourself, uh oh- I don't even know what I'm gonna say next, or you
• 00:12 look at somebody slides and it’s just a little bit too much information on them. Well in this video we’re going to look at the notes page as a
• 00:19 container to put your information in for various reasons. Now I'm going to go straight to slideshow mode, so I click F5 on the keyboard
• 00:26 and there is presenter view within PowerPoint, and it’s got various features that help us while we present. So here is the slide that the
• 00:34 audience sees also, and this is the next slide to allow us to think ahead and here is the notes pane area with nothing in it. Now presenter view
• 00:42 is the subject of a whole other video, but in this particular module we going to look at the notes pane as a container for information, the notes
• 00:50 page which is we can see that information, the notes master which controls the notes page, and then we’re going to print preview the notes
• 00:59 out so that we can see the final result. So firstly let's go to slide one. Now we need to make the notes pane available and the easiest way to do
• 01:09 that is to go to the view tab, click the button and there is our notes pane. We can move to this around to give ourself a bit more room to work in
• 01:18 as well. So control A to select all of the text, control C to copy, control V to paste, and now that information there will preview in presenter
• 01:29 view later on. So I want to reduce the amount of text so I select the last word in each sentence, control backspace and remove some of those
• 01:39 words because I intend to present this slide later live to an audience and it’s not essential that we have every word on the slide because we can
• 01:47 still speak about define, engage, implement, and so on. Now I would probably move this placeholder down a little bit to even it up, center
• 01:56 the text with control E, get rid of the bullet points, and there's a fair amount of further formatting that we could do if we wanted to. I
• 02:06 also select the logo and control X and that places the logo on the clipboard. So let's have a look at our actual notes page. The notes page is
• 02:15 a combination of the slide as well as the text from the notes pane and that's what we will see in presenter view later on, as well as when we
• 02:24 print and distribute to our audience. The whole view on the page is controlled by the notes master, so the notes master shows all of the
• 02:31 various objects on the slide and I can select that slide- I can even format it with a particular shape effect like a massive the glow around it. I’m not
• 02:40 sure why you would act to do that because it looks quite ugly but you can, you can go control right square bracket which increases the size of the
• 02:47 text, and I go to the home tab and I can number that also. Also control V paste the logo onto the page and we drag it to the right location. Then
• 02:58 it’s very important that we send it to the back to make sure that none of those objects are actually obscured by that logo. Close and there
• 03:07 is our new notes page and that’s only the start of the kind of formatting that can happen here. So let's have a look at how we can actually
• 03:14 distribute this information in different ways. First of all we go control P which is the keyboard shortcut to print. Now that’s our slide but I can
• 03:23 actually print the notes page and give that to the audience or share it as an exported PDF for email. So just remember that the notes page is
• 03:32 a wonderful place to put your information. You don't need to clutter your slides because you can have all of this information down on the
• 03:39 notes pane available when you print, when you share it and distribute it, and particularly in presenter view. So finally here is presenter view
• 03:48 again. We can see that the changes that we have made are updated on the slide and the formatting and this is a very useful feature to cut
• 03:56 down on the amount of information on slides, but still have content rich presentations to share with the audience. Notice the information in the
• 04:04 notes page which will help us to have some clues when we're presenting. It doesn't replace good rehearsal, but it’s a very handy set of
• 04:12 information to have when you’re presenting - it’s such a great feature of PowerPoint.

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