While printing PowerPoint handouts for your audience with just the slides can be useful, sometimes you may want to give them your notes as well as the slides, which is where Notes Print comes in. Contrary to its name, Notes Print includes slides as well as your notes underneath them.
To print the slides with notes, simply go to File | Print, select your printer and which slides you want to print.
Just like printing handouts without notes, the second option under settings is where you choose to print your slides with notes. This time, instead of choosing one of the Handouts options, choose Notes Pages under the Print Layout section at the top.
Notes Pages Options
There are some more printing options at the bottom of this pull-down list:
Frame Slides – unlike with handouts, where the frame is around the slide only, this option adds a simple black frame or border around the whole page – both slide and notes.
Scale to Fit Paper – means you don’t need to worry about paper sizes, PowerPoint will adjust the size of the elements to suit the selected paper.
High Quality – selects any high quality print option available on the printer. HQ options mean a slower print process which uses more ink. It’s normally not needed.
Print Comments – include any comments with the slides. (The comments will be numbered and placed at the bottom of the page, just like footnotes.)
Print Ink – include any digital ink on the slides.
Portrait or Landscape
Once you have selected the Notes Pages option, the dropdown to select page orientation will become available, so you can choose whether you want a horizontal (landscape) or vertical (portrait) layout.
There are other common printing options – whether you want the sheets printed out collated or not, whether you want color or grayscale etc.
Edit Header and Footer
Lastly, click the Edit Header & Footer link at the bottom to edit what appears at the top and bottom of each page.
Date and time to include this information in the top right-hand corner of each sheet. You can also choose whether to automatically print the current date and time, or a fixed date. If you choose to update the date automatically, you can click the dropdown to choose what format you want to use. If you choose the fixed option, it is actually just a free text field, so you can enter any format (or indeed any other text) that you want.
Page number box to insert page numbers in the bottom right-hand corner.
Header and/or Footer and enter the text that you want to appear at the top and/or bottom of each page. This text will appear on the top left / top right of each page.
This article has described the quickest and easiest way to print your slides with notes, without much in the way of fancy formatting options. For more advanced formatting options, you can use the Notes Master which we’ll deal with in an upcoming article.
