Locked lesson.
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
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Getting Familiar with the Notes pane.pptx512.3 KB Getting Familiar with the Notes pane - Complete.pptx
511.5 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.
- 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
- 00:11 look at somebody slides and is just a little bit too much information on them. Well in this video we 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
- 00:27 and there is the new presenter view within PowerPoint 2013, and it’s got various features that help us while we present. So here is the
- 00:35 slide that the audience sees also, and this is the next slide to allow us to think ahead and this is the notes pane area. Notice that it says ‘no
- 00:44 notes’. Presenter view is the subject of a whole other video, but in this particular module we're going to look at the notes pane as a container
- 00:53 for information, the notes page which is we can see that information, the notes master which controls the notes page, and then we’re going to
- 01:01 print preview the notes out in a couple of different formats. So let's firstly go to our first slide. We need to make the notes pane
- 01:11 available and the easiest way to do that is to go to the view tab, click the notes button and there is our notes pane. We can move this around
- 01:19 to give ourself more room to work. So control A to select all of the text, control C to copy, control V, and now that information there will
- 01:31 preview in presenter view. I want to reduce the amount of text so I select the last word in each sentence, control backspace and remove some
- 01:42 of those 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
- 01:50 because we can still talk about define, engage, implement, and so on. Now I would probably move this placeholder down a little bit too even it
- 01:59 up, centre 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
- 02:10 also select the logo and go control X and that places the logo on the clipboard. So let's have a look at our actual notes page. So the notes
- 02:20 page is a combination of the slide as well as the text from the notes pane and that's what we see in presenter view as well as what we can see
- 02:28 when we actually print or distribute it to our audience as a PDF. This whole view on the page is controlled by the notes master, so the notes
- 02:37 master shows all of the various objects on the slide and I can select that slide- I can even format it with a particular shape effect like a
- 02:45 massive big glow around it. Now I’m not sure why you would actually do that because it looks ugly but you can do that, you can go control
- 02:53 plus right square bracket which increases the size of the text, and I go to the home tab and I can number that. Also control V- paste the logo
- 03:03 onto the page when we put it in the right location then we must send it to the back to make sure that none of those objects are obscured by that
- 03:12 logo. Close and there is our new notes page and that is only the start of the kind of formatting that can happen here. So let's have a little look
- 03:21 at how we can actually export this information out in different ways. First of all we go control P which is the keyboard shortcut to print. Now
- 03:29 that's our slide but I can actually print the notes page and give that to the audience or I can share and export it or create a PDF for emailing.
- 03:39 So just remember that the notes page is a wonderful place to put your information. You don't need to clutter your slides because you
- 03:46 can have all of this information down on the notes pane available when you print, when you share and particularly in presenter view and so
- 03:54 finally F5, and here is our presenter view. We can see that the changes that we made are updated on the slide and the formatting and this
- 04:03 is a very useful feature to cut down on the amount of information on slides, but still have a content rich presentation to share with the
- 04:11 audience. This doesn't replace good rehearsal, but it is very handy to have information available when you presenting and it is a great feature of
- 04:21 PowerPoint.
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