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About this lesson

We will learn how to add comments to a PowerPoint presentation and how to delete, respond to and manage comments in a presentation that has been sent to them. We will also learn how to add speaker notes to slides and view the notes whilst presenting.

Exercise files

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

6.02-adding-comments-notes Exercise.docx
372.5 KB 6.02-adding-comments-notes Exercise Solution.docx
4.6 MB

Quick reference

Adding Comments and Notes

We can add notes to assist us when presenting to a live audience. Notes remind us of the talking points for each slide and keep us on track. We can print out a physical copy of the slides with the notes included or view our notes on the screen when presenting. 

Comments are a way for teams to communicate, give feedback or make suggestions. Anyone with access can add comments or reply to comments in a presentation. 

When to use

We add notes to a presentation whenever we intend to present to a live audience. We add comments whenever we want to provide feedback on a slide. This might include suggesting corrections. 

Instructions

Show Notes

There are three ways to show notes in a presentatation. 

The View Tab
  1. From the View tab, in the Show group, click Notes. 
  2. Type notes. 
  3. Click Notes again to hide the notes area. 
The Status Bar
  1. In the status bar, click the Notes button. 
  2. Click the Notes button again to hide the notes area. 
With the Mouse
  1. Hover your mouse over the top boundary line that separates the status bar from the slide. 
  2. Drag the boundary line up to reveal the notes area. 
  3. Drag the boundary line down to hide the notes area. 

Print Notes

Notes can be printed out along with the corresponding slide. 

  1. From the File tab, click Print. 
  2. From the Slides section, click the drop-down and select Notes Pages. 
  3. Click Print. 

Presenter View

Presenter view is useful when presenting to a live audience. As the presenter, we can see the current slide, the next slide and any related notes. 

  1. From the Slide Show tab, in the Monitors group, put a tick in the box Use Presenter View. 
  2. Press F5 to run the slide show. 
  3. Hover the mouse over the icons in the bottom left-hand corner. 
  4. Click the elipses. 
  5. Select Show Presenter View. 
  6. Notes are on the right-hand side. 

Comments

Comments are a good way of keeping track of changes and feedback from other team members. Multiple people can add comments to a presentation. Each comment is tagged with the comment authors initials.

Comments in PowerPoint are threaded, meaning anyone who has access to the presentation can reply to comments. 

  1. Select the object on the slide to add the comment to. 
  2. From the Insert tab, in the Comments group, select Comment. 
  3. Or, from the Review tab, in the Comments group, select New Comment. 
  4. Type a comment into the Comments Pane. 

When the comments pane is closed, the comment will still be visible on the slide as a blue bubble. 

  1. Click on the bubble to view the comment. 

Navigate Comments

If a presentation contains many comments, it can be useful to navigate through each one efficiently. 

  1. From the Review tab, in the Comments group, select Previous or Next. 

Delete Comments

  1. From the Review tab, in the Comments group, select Delete. 
  2. Choose Delete All Comments on Slide or Delete All Comments in this Presentation. 

Print Comments

  1. From the File tab, select Print. 
  2. In the Slides section, click the first drop-down and select Print Comments. 
  3. Click Print. 

Hints & tips

  • Any comments added to the presentation will be tagged with the author initials. 
  • It is recommended that all comments are deleted from the presentation before sending to a client. 
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  • 00:04 If you plan to show your presentation to an audience,
  • 00:07 then you're going to want to know about notes.
  • 00:09 Because notes can really help you stay on track when
  • 00:13 you're delivering a presentation live to a group of people.
  • 00:17 And you can use this notes area at the bottom of each slide to maybe add some
  • 00:21 points to talk about.
  • 00:23 Or if you plan on sending this presentation to a colleague or a client,
  • 00:27 you could use the notes pane to expand on the information that's already in
  • 00:32 the slide.
  • 00:33 And the cool thing with notes is that if you're using presenter view,
  • 00:37 which I'll go into a bit later on, you can actually see your notes on the screen as
  • 00:41 you're presenting so they're always there in front of your eyes.
  • 00:45 Alternatively, if you want to print this presentation,
  • 00:48 you can print out the notes separately and essentially create yourself some handouts.
  • 00:53 So let's take a look at how notes work.
  • 00:56 Now I mentioned a few moments ago that you can see your notes at the bottom of each
  • 01:00 of your slides.
  • 01:01 And on the face of it if you look at my presentation, you currently can't see
  • 01:05 anything which would suggest there's some notes included in here and
  • 01:09 that's because currently I have my notes pane hidden.
  • 01:12 And there are three different ways that you can pull up the notes area.
  • 01:17 The first thing I could do is jump across to my View tab and in the show group,
  • 01:21 I have a Notes button.
  • 01:23 If I click this,
  • 01:24 it's going to pop open the notes pane right at the bottom of the screen.
  • 01:27 And you should see now I have this little area that says Click to add notes.
  • 01:32 Now I'm just going to switch notes off by toggling that button again because
  • 01:37 the second way we can pull up that notes pane is down in the status bar.
  • 01:41 If you take a look just next to where we have our views,
  • 01:44 I have a little Notes button.
  • 01:46 Once again if I click that, it's going to pop up those notes and
  • 01:50 this is also a little toggle so I can click it to show or hide.
  • 01:54 The third way is probably the simplest, I can hover my mouse over that border where
  • 01:59 the bottom of the slide meets the status bar until I get that double headed arrow.
  • 02:04 Then I could just drag up to expand out that notes area and
  • 02:08 you can see I can use this to adjust the height of my notes.
  • 02:12 So now I can go in and add my main talking points for this particular slide.
  • 02:17 So now that I've added some notes into the bottom of this slide,
  • 02:20 I can use these notes in one of two ways.
  • 02:23 I might choose to print off the notes so
  • 02:25 I can take a physical copy with me into my presentation.
  • 02:30 Or if I'm going to use presenter view when I'm showing my slides,
  • 02:34 I can see any notes on the screen.
  • 02:37 So let's take a look at both of those options.
  • 02:40 The first one is printing out your notes.
  • 02:43 Now I'm going to go into printing a lot more in one of the later sections, but
  • 02:47 just so you can see what I mean, let's jump up to the File tab and
  • 02:51 go down to Print.
  • 02:53 Now if I want to print out my notes, I need to go to this slide section and
  • 02:58 where we have Slides, I can choose to print the Notes Pages.
  • 03:03 And what this is going to do is it's going to print out the slide plus the notes
  • 03:07 underneath.
  • 03:08 So this is super useful because you know which notes correspond to which slide.
  • 03:13 Alternatively, if I'm presenting this on a projector to a room full of people,
  • 03:17 I can have my notes on the screen, but I need to make sure I'm in Presenter View.
  • 03:21 And again, I'm going to go into this a lot more in later lessons, but
  • 03:25 let's quickly take a look at what that looks like.
  • 03:29 If we go across to the Slide Show tab,
  • 03:31 you want to make sure you have a tick in Use Presenter View.
  • 03:36 So now if I run my presentation by pressing F5,
  • 03:40 the presentation looks fairly normal, I can't see my notes.
  • 03:45 But if I hover over the corner of the screen,
  • 03:48 you can see I have some faded out icons.
  • 03:51 If I click the ellipsis, I want to make sure I select Show Presenter View and
  • 03:55 I get a completely different way of viewing this presentation.
  • 04:00 So here I can see the slide that I'm currently on, I can see what the next
  • 04:04 slide is which again is super useful, and then I can see the notes underneath.
  • 04:10 I can navigate through my slide deck.
  • 04:13 So this is great if you're ever presenting to a large audience.
  • 04:18 So just remember your notes are going to be shown in here.
  • 04:21 And incidentally, people often ask me, well,
  • 04:24 what do the people who are viewing your presentation actually see?
  • 04:27 Or rest assured they don't see this, they just see your presentation slide.
  • 04:33 Now more on presenter view a little bit later on.
  • 04:36 Now the other thing that I'd like to talk about in this lesson is comments.
  • 04:40 And comments are particularly important if you are sharing this presentation with
  • 04:45 other colleagues.
  • 04:47 Comments allow you to leave little notes on the side for
  • 04:51 yourself or other people to review.
  • 04:54 So for example if you want somebody to change something,
  • 04:57 you can add a comment and direct it towards that specific person.
  • 05:02 So for example maybe Miranda has just got married and
  • 05:05 her surname has changed, so we need to update this slide.
  • 05:09 So what I could do is select Miranda, I'm going to go to the Insert tab and
  • 05:14 in the middle here I have a Comment button.
  • 05:17 It's also worth noting if you go to the Review tab,
  • 05:20 you have a whole Comments section.
  • 05:23 So I'm going to say New Comment.
  • 05:26 And what you'll notice is the comments pane opens up on the right hand side.
  • 05:30 The comment is going to be tagged with my name and
  • 05:34 I can say, please update Miranda's name and for
  • 05:37 the time being I'm just going to minimize that notes panel at the bottom.
  • 05:43 So what you can now see on my presentation is I have this little comment bubble.
  • 05:48 So anybody who's looking at this presentation knows that there is a comment
  • 05:52 in here.
  • 05:52 When you click on that comments button, it's going to open up that comment and
  • 05:57 because these are threaded comments, it means people can reply.
  • 06:00 So a colleague might log on here, change the name, and
  • 06:04 then just say name changed or updated, something like that.
  • 06:09 Now if I don't want this comments pane to open, if I go to the Show Comments button,
  • 06:13 I can choose to show the comments pane or just show the markup.
  • 06:18 So I'm going to deselect Comments Pane which is going to get rid of that and
  • 06:22 it's just going to keep that bubble on the page.
  • 06:25 Once again, I can click to reopen up that comments pane.
  • 06:29 Now if I receive a PowerPoint presentation and there are lots of comments in it,
  • 06:33 I might need to go through all of them.
  • 06:35 And again in this comments group,
  • 06:37 I have a couple of buttons in here that are going to help me do that.
  • 06:40 So if I turn on the Comments Pane, if I have a lot of comments in here,
  • 06:44 I can choose to jump to the next one or go back to the previous comment.
  • 06:49 And of course we also have a Delete button in here which is going to allow me to
  • 06:53 delete the comment that I currently have selected.
  • 06:56 I can delete all comments on the slide or all comments in the presentation.
  • 07:01 Now when it comes to printing, you can also print comments if you want to.
  • 07:05 So let's go back into File and down to Print.
  • 07:09 If you have comments in your presentation,
  • 07:12 if you click the drop down where it currently says Notes Pages,
  • 07:16 you can see here I have it tick next to Print Comments.
  • 07:20 If you don't actually want to print these comments,
  • 07:22 then make sure you deselect that option.
  • 07:24 So I'm going to delete all comments on this slide and
  • 07:28 then turn off my comments pane.
  • 07:31 So that is how you add notes and comments to your PowerPoint presentation.

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