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Have you ever heard of PowerPoint speaker notes?
You probably have.
They are those notes that the speaker used to write down on a piece of paper to keep at hand in old presentations.
So, PowerPoint decided to make available a feature that allows you to add speaker notes directly into your presentation.
Why is it worthwhile to talk about such a simple topic?
PowerPoint’s speaker notes have many different facets and, when used correctly, can support you in different contexts allowing you to create effective presentations.
What are speaker notes in PowerPoint?
That’s right; let’s start with the basics and quickly clarify what we’re talking about.
PowerPoint allows you to add speaker notes in every slide, or to be precise, below every slide.
This way, every time you scroll through the slides you will always have available the notes related to the slide you are commenting on.
Convenient, isn’t it?
Indeed, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Don’t just assume that this is the only way to use PowerPoint speaker notes, because I’m about to show you that there’s much, much more to it than that.
Are you with me?
Then let’s begin right away by appreciating its benefits.
What are the pros of using speaker notes in PowerPoint?
Have you ever had the fear of not remembering what to say during your next presentation?
If so, PowerPoint speaker notes are a powerful ally for you.
They allow you to jot down key information, numbers, or even sources and all kinds of information that you shouldn’t forget.
This is the main reason why the average user discovers the existence of this tool.
Is it wrong, Maurizio?
Absolutely not, it’s perfectly fine to use speaker notes to support your argument, especially if they give you peace of mind.
However, you must avoid getting caught reading the notes.
I remember a speaker at a business meeting who decided to share his presentation using the projector in the meeting room, but spent the entire meeting reading speaker notes on his laptop.
If this were to happen to you, you would communicate unpreparedness and your audience would struggle to focus on the projected slides because you would be constantly looking at your laptop screen.
If you follow my blog or have read my Lean Presentation Design book, you know how much I care about building an empathetic relationship with the audience.
So, you can clearly see that giving a presentation by looking at your PowerPoint speaker notes on your laptop without looking at your audience is not an empathetically effective approach.
How do you do it, then?
Use the PowerPoint speaker notes as a support, a safety net, but make sure you always know your topic well and don’t need to read your entire speech.
You should only need to peek at them here and there during your presentation.
Let’s get technical.
How do I add speaker notes in PowerPoint?
This is actually really easy!
Go to PowerPoint and look below your current slide.
You’ll see that there’s an edge that you can drag upwards.
Did you find it?
When you drag it, you’ll notice that it opens a panel within which you can enter text.
In that panel you can insert PowerPoint speaker notes.
Have you noticed that the speaker notes panel looks like a simple text editor?
The logic of slide freedom doesn’t apply, you can only write in there.
After all, you need this panel to free you from the constraints of design (alignments, distributions, font size and style) and focus on the content – what you need to write.
For now, I’ll just insert some sample text with the =lorem() function to show you how to use notes.
As you can see, you have plenty of space to write freely in the notes field.
How do I use speaker notes in PowerPoint during a presentation?
Okay, you’ve set up your notes by entering key information that you don’t want to risk forgetting while you’re speaking.
How can you view them during your presentation?
The typical mistake is to have your PowerPoint run full screen with the F5 key.
How? I shouldn’t be presenting in full screen, Maurizio?
I didn’t say that.
You should certainly present full-screen, but that’s the visual you should offer your audience – you should see the “behind the scenes” of the presentation.
I don’t understand, I am not following you.
I’ll give you an example.
If you switch to full screen presenter mode, you will see this.
I used my presentation on the Lean Presentation Design eCourse as an example.
What you should see instead is PowerPoint’s speaker mode.
This way you will have a clear overview of the slide you are projecting, the slide that will follow, and your PowerPoint notes.
Where are the notes?
I am highlighting them in the following image.
With PowerPoint speaker mode you’ll have your notes conveniently placed under the following slide.
How do you achieve this effect?
In a live presentation, simply connect your laptop to a projector with an HDMI or VGA cable to extend the screen.
Remember, it’s important to extend the screen and not duplicate it because you want to have two different visuals on the two screens.
To extend your screen on Windows just use the shortcut WIN+P. This will open the side panel shown in the next figure, where you’ll have to choose the extend mode.
Be careful: if you use a wireless screen sharing tool, such as Clickshare, then you might have difficulties in extending the desktop since these tools are designed for screen duplication.
In case you need it, I’ve written a short guide where I explain how to set an extended screen mode with Clickshare as well: How to activate the PowerPoint Presenter view with Clickshare.
This is a powerful technique because it allows you to always have your eyes on your notes and the next slide without ever having to turn to look at the screen.
Please, don’t tell me you’re one of those speakers who turns to look at their slides at every screen to remember what to say.
If you were, from now on you will know how to change and devote 100% of your attention to look at and interact with your audience, rather than the projector.
Naturally, I expect you to grasp the information you need at a glance from a laptop that will be strategically placed between you and your audience.
If you lose yourself looking at your laptop and stop looking at your audience then you are making a common, serious mistake and will end up losing all contact with your audience.
How to use speaker notes in PowerPoint during a virtual presentation?
Although so heavily judged, online presentations offer a great opportunity when it comes to advanced management of live direction.
By being behind a screen and having your own location you can exploit notes in a much more effective way than if you were in person.
In what sense, Maurizio?
I’ll give you an example right now.
Check out my setup during an online presentation.
I have Microsoft Teams on the left, while on the right I have PowerPoint in speaker mode with the speaker notes.
This way I can monitor the chat and interact with my audience, but at the same time I have control over the direction of the presentation.
What will your audience see when you share the screen, Maurizio?
They will only see the full-screen slide because you will only share the slideshow.
Sorry Mauri, but I’m a little confused by this complex setup.
If that’s the case, I understand, and that’s why I recorded a short video where I show you how to do it.
Got it?
Now stop reading, launch a PowerPoint presentation and try this new way of presenting right away.
If you can’t figure it out, ask me for an explanation using the comments on the YouTube video so that I will get an email right away as soon as you submit yours.
Can you see how nice it is to have your notes at your fingertips while you’re speaking?
When you deliver your online presentation, if you do it right, no one will even know you’re using them, and they’ll guarantee you a better performance and more peace of mind during your presentation.
What should speaker notes include?
But what should you include in these PowerPoint speaker notes?
Let me tell you about one use I make of them during my training activities.
There is a Pixar story case study that I usually tell in English during my Lean Presentation Design courses.
Obviously, using the original words while telling the story in the original words makes a big difference and that’s why, on the very slide where I talk about it, I keep the exact words and actually read the story.
Clearly, I only do this virtually – in person I can’t, otherwise I’d have to get close to my laptop and dive my head in while reading, it wouldn’t look good at all.
So, if you’re delivering presentations in a foreign language, it can help to write down the text of the speech or maybe a few words that you have a harder time remembering.
Another occasion when I recommend you use notes is to write down numbers, statistics, or other quantitative evidence that you would have trouble remembering during the presentation, but that you know would enrich your speech.
I also often write the speech underneath each slide when I’m designing a presentation for others. Sometimes I also include all the information about the speaker change during the event, so that with a simple PowerPoint every speaker on stage knows what to do.
Sometimes it can help to write down the sources you need to mention during your presentation to build credibility for your argument.
How do I use speaker notes in PowerPoint to create handouts?
Of all the ways to use speaker notes in PowerPoint, this one deserves a dedicated paragraph because of its strategic importance.
Traditionally, a presentation is created either to be presented or to be read and, depending on the case, you need to manage content density differently.
If you are creating a report presentation that you are not going to present, you need to make it self-standing, and therefore you need more content on the slides.
Clearly, you don’t want to be presenting all that content, otherwise you risk having an audience that doesn’t listen to you but ends up reading your slides.
Following the rules of traditional presentation design, I would suggest you make two versions of the same presentation, a slim one to present and a full one to share so that it can be read, as we usually call them.
Sorry Maurizio, won’t that take me twice as long?
Exactly!
For this reason, Lean Presentation Design is a methodology that maximizes effectiveness, but never at the expense of efficiency.
Here’s where it makes sense to use notes to create handouts.
What are handouts?
Imagine designing the presentation in a slim version, so that it will be presented, but writing the whole speech in the notes slide by slide.
Now go to the print options and select: “print with notes on page”.
Here’s PowerPoint interpreting the slide as an A4 document with your notes right below.
Okay, but what do I do now, do I print?
No, wait.
Now change the printer with the Microsoft Print to PDF.
At last, you can now go to print.
The result will be an A4 presentation with the slides on top and the comments below.
Can you see the power of this approach?
You’ve got a slim presentation to present with lightweight slides and a self-standing PDF presentation to read in one document.
The only thing you must pay attention to is that you have to write the notes connecting well one slide with the other, because as you are not the one who decides when to move to the next slide, it will be your audience who will move freely within the document.
My advice is to always leave a space before the last line and use it to create the sentence connecting the next slide.
This way, when the reader gets to the last sentence of the commentary, he or she will understand that it’s time to turn the page and will follow along in his or her reading experience in a natural way.
How do you write speaker notes for a presentation?
The great thing about writing in PowerPoint’s speaker notes field is that you don’t have to pay attention to the design and font style, because they are for your own use or will eventually be printed in PDF.
In any case, you won’t have any problems with overflowing text boxes that overlap with the slide and that you have to adapt by reducing the font size.
In fact, you’ll be able to write in the notes focusing solely on the content.
Maurizio, why are you telling me this, is there a “but” coming?
Yes, there is a “but”!
Remember that in Lean Presentation Design we don’t design a presentation, we design the experience of using the document for our audience.
So, if you’re writing for handouts, it’s clear that you’ll need to highlight keywords, write in a font that’s comfortable to read, and maybe leave some paragraph space to improve usability.
How do I print speaker notes in PowerPoint?
Earlier I showed you how to create a handout document, that is, with notes below the slides.
To do this we used a PDF printout of the PowerPoint with the notes on the page.
Now I’ll show you that there is already a handout export feature, and it also offers several interesting options:
You can place the speaker notes next to the slide thumbnails, below the slide or export them without slides.
In this case, you will get a word document with the collection of all the speaker notes of your presentation.
Finally, you just need to print the word document to print the notes.
How do I delete speaker notes in PowerPoint?
Cleaning up a PowerPoint presentation from all the notes slide by slide can be very time consuming.
I’m sure there’s a trick, right Maurizio?
Indeed, there is!
Open the File > PowerPoint Info menu and follow Check for Issues > Inspect Document. Scroll down the panel that appears and at the bottom you will find the presentation notes.
Now launch the inspection by clicking on Inspect and you will see a Remove All button appear next to the presentation notes:
Be careful, because once you click it, there’s no going back.
How to hide speaker notes in PowerPoint
Viewing or hiding PowerPoint’s speaker notes is a convenient option as you work. To view the panel, you can drag it up as I showed you earlier, or even click on Notes.
It doesn’t get any easier than that!
Examples of speaker notes in PowerPoint
To sum up, there are several application cases of notes in PowerPoint. You could use them to keep an eye on important numbers with their sources, when present.
Another example of PowerPoint speaker notes is the full speech written below the slide.
Of course, I expect you not to read your notes blindly but to use them as handout support in case you need to share your PowerPoint.
I’ll leave it to you to come up with the next example of how to use speaker notes in PowerPoint; leave a comment to this post.
PowerPoint Speaker Notes: Conclusions
PowerPoint speaker notes are a powerful ally whether you need to create a slim and full presentation at the same time or if you just need a placeholder so that you don’t forget something during your next presentation.
To add PowerPoint notes, simply drag up the panel at the bottom of the slide as shown above.
How do you use PowerPoint speaker mode?
Sources
Add speaker notes to your slides
Everything You Need to Know About Using Speaker Notes in PowerPoint
Comments on PowerPoint Speaker Notes – The Ultimate Guide