Getting Familiar with the Notes Pane

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About this lesson

A very clever location to add extra text to a slide that your audience may not see, but you can use as an aid when presenting or as printed handouts.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2010, 2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Getting Familiar with the Notes Pane.pptx
539.8 KB Getting Familiar with the Notes Pane - Completed.pptx
530.3 KB

Quick reference

Topic

Using the Notes Pane to hold additional information.

When to use

To print or email presentations, or as a visual aid when presenting

Instructions  

  • Type or paste text in the Notes Pane.
  • Use the Notes Master to customize Notes Page to include elements such as your company’s logo.
  • Either:
    • Print the presentation Notes Page, or
    • Save the presentation Notes Page as a PDF to email, or
    • View the Notes in Presenter View while presenting.

 

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  • 00:04 Have you ever been halfway through delivering a presentation and
  • 00:08 you think to yourself, uh-oh, I don't even know what I was going to say next?
  • 00:12 Or you look at somebody's slides and
  • 00:13 it's just a little bit too much information on them.
  • 00:17 Well, in this video, we're going to look at the notes pages container to put your
  • 00:20 information in for various reasons.
  • 00:23 Now I'm going to go straight to Slideshow mode, so
  • 00:26 I click F5 on the keyboard and there is presenter view within PowerPoint.
  • 00:31 It's got various features that help us while we present.
  • 00:34 So here is the slide that the audience sees also,
  • 00:36 and this is the next slide to allow us to think ahead.
  • 00:39 And this is the Notes pane area.
  • 00:42 Notice that it says No Notes.
  • 00:44 Presenter view was the subject of a whole other video, but in this particular module
  • 00:48 we're going to look at the Notes pane as a container for your information.
  • 00:52 The Notes Page which is where we can see that information.
  • 00:55 The Notes Master which controls the Notes Page and then we're going to print
  • 00:59 preview the notes out in a couple of different formats.
  • 01:02 So let's firstly go to our first slide.
  • 01:05 We need to make the Notes pane available and the easiest way to do that
  • 01:08 is to go to the View tab, click the Notes button, and there is our Notes pane.
  • 01:14 We can move this around to give ourself more room to work.
  • 01:16 So Ctrl+8 or select all of the text.
  • 01:19 Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V, and
  • 01:21 now that information there will preview in presenter view.
  • 01:26 I want to reduce the amount of text, so I select the last word in each sentence,
  • 01:30 Ctrl+Backspace, I've removed some of those words.
  • 01:34 Because I intend to present this slide later to an audience, and
  • 01:37 it's not essential that we have every word on every slide.
  • 01:41 I would probably move this placeholder down a little bit to even it up,
  • 01:46 center the text with Ctrl+E, get rid of the bullet points, and there's
  • 01:51 a fair amount of further formatting that we could do if we wanted to.
  • 01:54 I also select the logo and go Ctrl+X, and that places the logo on the clipboard.
  • 01:59 So let's have a look at our actual Notes page.
  • 02:02 So the Notes page is a combination of the slide as well as the text from
  • 02:06 the Notes pane.
  • 02:06 And that's what we see in presenter view as well as what we can see
  • 02:11 when we actually print or distribute it to our audience as a PDF.
  • 02:15 This whole view on the page is controlled by the Notes Master, so
  • 02:18 the Notes Master shows all of the various objects on the slide.
  • 02:22 And I can select that slide, I can even format it
  • 02:26 with a particular shape effect like a massive big glow around it.
  • 02:29 Now I'm not sure why you'd actually do that because it looks ugly, but
  • 02:31 you can do that.
  • 02:33 You can go Ctrl+ right square bracket which increases the size of the text and
  • 02:38 I go to the Home tab and I can number that.
  • 02:40 Also Ctrl+V pastes the logo onto the page where we put it in the right location.
  • 02:47 Then we must send it to the back, and
  • 02:50 then make sure that none of the objects are obscured by that logo.
  • 02:56 Close and there's our new Notes page and
  • 02:58 that is only the start of the kind of formatting that can happen here.
  • 03:02 So let's have a little look at how we're actually going to export
  • 03:05 this information out in different ways.
  • 03:08 First of all we go Ctrl+P which is the keyboard shortcut to print.
  • 03:12 Now that's our slide, but I can actually print the Notes page and give that to
  • 03:16 the audience or I can share and export it or create a PDF for emailing.
  • 03:22 So just remember that the Notes page is a wonderful place to put your information.
  • 03:26 You don't need to clutter your slides because you can have all of
  • 03:29 this information down on the Notes pane, and it's available when you print,
  • 03:33 when you share, and particularly in presenter view.
  • 03:37 And so finally F5, and here is our presenter view.
  • 03:42 We can see that the changes that we have made are updated on the slide, and
  • 03:46 the formatting.
  • 03:47 And this is a very useful feature to cut down on the amount of information on
  • 03:51 slides but still have a content rich presentation to share with the audience.
  • 03:55 This doesn't replace good rehearsal, but it's very handy to have information
  • 03:58 available when you're presenting and it's a great feature of PowerPoint.

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