I had an interesting case come across my desk earlier this week involving PowerPoint. It seemed this person wanted to print out the slides along with the notes that they had made. Actually, it gets a little more complicated than that. High-ranking administrator had originally created the PowerPoint and put notes along with each of the slides. After that, the slides were handed off to the person standing across from my desk who would be translating the presentation to Chinese. She then translated the notes in the PowerPoint slide to Chinese and added them alongside the original notes.
Now, it was just a matter of printing off the slides along with the notes, which is easy enough to do. You just go to the Office button and select Print. When you choose the final details of your print, under ‘Print what:’ you just choose Notes Pages and that would be exactly what my user wants.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite like that. The first slide was the title had no notes and printed fine. The second slide had notes in English and Chinese but also printed correctly. The third slide lost the image of the slide and let the notes continue running off the left edge of the paper without word wrap. The rest of the slides looked like the third slide and would not correctly serve their purpose.
Now you and I might know that PowerPoint’s notes is not its strong point. You’re supposed to put a few lines, just notes to remind you what you wanted to talk about not entire paragraphs and a transcript of what you’re going to say. Unfortunately, not everybody knows that or is willing to follow it. So they might end up with a slide that looks like this:
This slide (which I made) has the same problem when printing as the original presentation my user brought to me.
If we switch to the Notes Page view, this is almost exactly a preview of how the third slide looked when printed out. A good deal of the text was missing. If you click on the text it would give the box around it but it wasn’t staying within those bounds either. I could manually edit the notes to put paragraph breaks in but there were a lot of slides after this and it didn’t explain the problem.
The Solution
Once you have the slides completed, we want to export the slides to Microsoft Word. There you’ll be able to make any further edits to the notes and be given a picture of the slide, just like what printing the Notes page from PowerPoint should churn out.
To do this, go to the Office Button, then down to Publish, and then over to ‘Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word’ and give that a click.
This will bring up a little window asking for your options. You can decide where you want the notes in relation to the slides, if you just want blank lines, just an outline, and if you want the images of the slides or shortcuts to those slides.
Choose which ever options suits you best and hit Ok.
This will open Word, create a new document, and start migrating the slides over. This process can take a minute or two depending on the capability of your computer and how many slides are in the presentation.
When all is said and done, you’ll get something that looks like the image below. You can adjust the image to be bigger or smaller if you’d like and edit the notes if they needed.
Once in Word, in my experience, this will print correctly.