What are Speaker Notes in PowerPoint?

Speaker notes are hidden notes inside PowerPoint slides, which can be added to help keep up-to-date information about what is being presented (similar to ‘formal notes’). Speaker notes are only seen by the presenter, and are included as part of your slides to show on the projector or for those who are listening to your presentation by screen. If you want to use them yourself, you can print the notes from within PowerPoint for use by you or the audience. Either way they can be referred to on the slip of paper to remind you of useful information.

What are the Benefits of using Speaker Notes?

Speaker notes can help make you look more confident and can ensure you are more organized in the preparation of your presentation. This type of preparation will help you become a better speaker that knows what you’re talking about.

1. Speaker Notes Help Avoid Text-Heavy Slides

One of the benefits of using slide notes is that the presenter can either use the notes as reference to deliver points in the slides during the presentation or to use them as guidelines and to expand on them when necessary. This gives the presenter the ability to complete an ultimate visual experience that communicates without clutter.

2. Speaker Notes can Help Replace Paper Notes

Flashcards or paper notes can sometimes be looked upon as inelegant and as a cause for confusion. Many presenters suffer from this problem, so they practically have to go stuttering through their presentation. Hence the inadvertent reason behind many presenters blundering through their presentation because of this very problem.

3. Speaker Notes can be Helpful in Recalling Information

Speaking notes can be helpful when you have a hard time remembering some important piece of information. Moreover, speaking notes can be added as a precaution to make sure you retrieve the information when you have forgotten the information.

4. Speaker Notes can Enable You to Stay on Point

With slides of text blocks and elaborate designs, a presenter can easily forget his points and end up confusing his audience with ambiguity. That’s a big no-no. You can add speaker notes to help you stay focused.

5. Speaker Notes can Help you Appear More Confident

From the success of these examples, we can infer that people appreciate a presenter when they can look him/her in the eye, speak their heart, and not fear. Standing at a podium, looking down, and looking down at notes are perceptual cues, that may lead to a presenter’s performance being perceived as shy or unprepared.

How to Add Notes to PowerPoint?

There are several ways to add speaker notes if enabled under PowerPoint options. In this short tutorial we explain how to add notes to PowerPoint depending on your preferred platform.

How to Add Speaker Notes to PowerPoint for Windows?

Step 1: Go to the Slide you want to add speaker notes to.

Step 2: Select Notes on the bottom right section of the screen.

Step 3: Add your notes.

How to Add Speaker Notes to PowerPoint for macOS?

Step 1: Select the slide that you would like to add speaker notes to.

Step 2: Click Notes in the lower right section of thePowerPoint screen.

Step 3: Add your notes to the highlighted area of the slide

How to Print PowerPoint with Speaker Notes?

Printing Speaker Notes with Slide Thumbnails:

Go to File > Print > Settings > Notes Pages

Printing Speaker Notes without Slide Thumbnails:

Go to View > Notes Pages (delete the thumbnails for each slide)

Then, File > Print > Settings > Notes Pages

How to Create a PowerPoint Notes Master

If you want to alter the layout of the PowerPoint Notes Page, you can do so in the Notes Master (to the right of the Notes Page button on the ribbon). Here you can update the formatting of all the Notes Pages in your deck which includes backgrounds, arrangement of the placeholder content elements (header, slide image, footer, date, body text, and page number), adding a grid using guides, and even adding custom elements, such as extra graphics, logos, and other non-placeholder content. You can even set a different brand style to your presentation with a new color and font theme. In fact, you’ll have to copy these over from your main presentation if you want to keep things consistent. You can also change the Notes Page orientation from portrait to landscape.

How to Reset a PowerPoint Notes Page

If you alter a notes page and then decide you want to reset it to the original layout, you need to use the Reapply Master function. As far as I can tell, the only way to do this is on a blank area of the notes page right-click, choose Notes Layout, then Reapply Master from the pop-up menu. This will reset the notes page to the default in the notes master. That includes resetting the position of moved objects, restoring deleted elements, and removing any custom formatting from the text.

Possible Problems with PowerPoint Notes Pages

There are a number of problems with the PowerPoint format that’s worth knowing about:

Page size

As noted above, it’s confusing that you can’t change the notes page size anywhere in the PowerPoint interface. In the Notes Master, there’s a group called Page Size where you can change the orientation of the page and the size of the slide, but it’s the size of the presentation slide, not the notes page. Doing this could ruin your actual presentation. To change the page size itself, you have to go to File > Print > Printer > Printer Properties > Advanced >Paper Sizes.

Print setup

When you change your notes page size, bear in mind that those setting changes specifically for your printer, not for the document. Those changes will reflect on the notes page for all subsequent presentations that you open. If you go on to choose another printer, or decide to print to PDF, the changes made to the notes page will revert back to it’s default size again. And of course, this will cause problems sharing the file with others, especially if they’re in a different country and use a different paper size (Letter in the US and A4 everywhere else, for example).

Hyperlinks

You can’t add hyperlinks to objects in Notes Pages. However, if your text includes a URL, then the text will transform into a hyperlink when clicked. If you want to add hyperlinks to slide notes, you can create objects in normal view (standard presentation editing) and then copy the hyperlinks to the slides. It’s rare that doing this would be necessary however as PowerPoint is almost always automatic and does not require you to do anything extra to make this work.

Placeholder scaling

When you change the remarks section size, the scaling of the slides you have chosen is odd. It seems that it doesn’t like the slide image placeholder, which has scaled differently and ends up partially off the page. For the sake of consistency, this must be changed first before you make any other movement. Caption size should be fixed at the beginning.

Final Thoughts

I hope you gained new knowledge on how to enhance your PowerPoint presentation’s effectiveness in our tutorial article written today. Remember, adding and printing notes shouldn’t be a difficult or time-consuming task. So whether you are going to be presenting in front of 10 people or 1,000 people, use it to your benefit and make your presentation memorable. You will avoid awkward silences when you create a helpful annotation system and make sure that your comments are shortened and relate to the content of your presentation. You will also avoid rambling on and on without making a point, keeping your message concise and to the point.