Printing PowerPoint
Speaker's Notes & Handouts

by Sara W. Tucker
zztuck@washburn.edu

Why Print It - Isn't It Supposed to be a Show?  Well yes, but that doesn't mean that some print version of it might not still be helpful either to the presenter or the audience or both.

• Make a print version just for yourself. Presenters often find themselves forgetting just which slide comes next, or wanting to have at hand more information than is up on the slide. As you build a PPT presentation, you can create notes to accompany each slide. Those notes than can be printed up (appearing under a print version of each slide, one slide to a page); this then can be your presentation script. If you don't have notes, you can also get a good presentation script by printing out just the Outline of your slides' text.
• Make a print version for everyone. Many times you don't want your class or other audience busily scribbling down the content of your slides - you want them thinking, discussing, whatever. You can print up any number of versions of your presentation: one slide at a time, many slides/page, or  just the outline of titles and bulleted text.
How to Do It (Tech)

• Open the PowerPoint presentation to be printed.
• Click on File; in the drop-down box which appears, click on Print (to see Print, you may have to click on the double arrows that appear at the bottom of the short-version drop-down box. These lenghten the box to its full extent.) In the Print box that appears, you have many choices and decisions:
• Printer. Select any connected to the computer on which you are working, or select "Print to File" - this creats a printer-ready file which, if accessed later from another computer setup, doesn't require PowerPoint be loaded onto that setup in order for the file to be printed. Click on Properties to set print level (draft, normal, best), paper tyoe (ex: transparency film), and paper size.
• Copies. If you choose to make many sets of copies, choose collate to have them printed in set order (1,2, 3,4; 1, 2,3,4, etc)
• Print Range: all, current slide, or selection. If all, you'll get the whole show - printed in whatever view you have up (so if you are in Outline view, you'll get the whole outline printed, not the slides themselves)
• Print What? Here is where you choose what version of the show you want printed: Slides, Handout, Notes Pages, Outline View.  Slides gives you one slide per printed page. Notes Pages and Outline View give you just what it sounds like: printouts, taking however many pages are needed, of all the text on your slides (Outline View) or all of the notes you created for yourself, as accompanyment to each slide (Notes Pages).Handouts lets you print up a variable number of slides per page (2-9) and choose whether to have them printed horizontally or vertically.
• Other Choices  Finally, at the bottom of the box, you can also choose to print in grayscale (to save on color cartridge ink), pure black and white (creates a line drawing look by eliminating all grays), put framing lines around slides, and have the printer scale them to fit the paper.
Pedagogical Adjustments: Hidden Bullets, Other Approaches
 
• Giving your audience a copy of your presentation may well mean changing just how you construct that presentation. This can happen several ways.
• Hidden Bullets. You may be used to using an animated bullet style in which the next bullet doesn't appear until you call it up. This works well for class discussion, as you might say "what comes next" and then only reveal your answer after the class has had a shot at saying what it should be. If they are all sitting there with the next bullet clearly printed out for them, this technique loses a great deal! 
Actually, there is a way to get around this: you creat bullets, but NOT in the formal layout format (see below) through which PowerPoint knows that it has bullets.
 

PPT icon for
bulleted layout

For any slide on which you want bullets that won't show up on the outline, do the following: Go to Format/Slide layout. Select the choice that gives you just a title on an otherwise blank slide (see below).


Screen shot showing Title Only slide layout format selected

Once you have a slide with that layout, go to Insert, then click on Text box (see below). Put your point of insertion within the slide and click once. A very small text box rectangle will appear. Immediately click on your toolbar's bullet button (again see below) and an inactive bullet should appear within the text box. You want to put something into the text box right away, because if you don't and go to do anything else, you empty text box will disappear permanently. Once something is in it, it will remain in existence, even if invisible.


Screen shot showing title-only slide layout, with text box added.

Now key in your bullets. These will show up on the projected slide, but won't register in any outline you print. It's also pretty easy to go back to regular, "recognized" bullets, hould you ever change approaches/audiences. Just select and cut all of your bulleted text, change the slide's format to the regular bulleted text one, and then paste your bulleted text into the bulleted text box that will appear. You'll have to do a little format cleanup, but nothing hard.
 

• Revise Slides. You could also just revise your slides, perhaps creating a second, some-bullets-left-out audience-interactive version of an established full-bullet presentation. Nobody says all the information you present has to be up there, already written out, all of the time. So you could deliberately re-write bulleted lists to leave out a couple of the most discussable points, perhaps even inserting a final "What else" bullet. In this case it is a useful added refinement to hit return a couple of times below your bulleted list (and clicking out of the bullet format), so that your printed outline will have some extra white space (see below) in which your audience can write the added topics that come up in discussion.