Speaker Notes in PowerPoint 2013 (Revisited)

There are lot of new features in PowerPoint 2013 but many other existing features were also renewed in this version of the popular presentation software in MS Office 15.

In PowerPoint 2003 and earlier it was common to refer to Speaker Notes where we wanted to print the notes associated to each slide. These speaker notes had one strong intention: to be useful for the presenter during a meeting or presentation, and usually presenters printed the handouts to share with the audience.

But in recent versions of PowerPoint since 2007 the term was simplified. Now we will see that Speaker Notes are just Notes. Aside of Notes we can also find Comments (this was available in earlier versions of PowerPoint but displayed differently).

With Notes and Comments we have all the same power to annotate our presentations. This can be helpful during the PPT design process but also useful for the audience who want the handouts of the presentations. As you can see, Notes are displayed in the traditional way (below the slide) while Comments are not displayed in the right sidebar instead of the yellow post-it notes.

How to print/edit Handouts in PowerPoint 2013

Once you complete your presentation with Notes (formerly Speaker Notes), then you may be interested to put slides and notes in a Word document or print the handout. This can be done easily in the new version of PowerPoint 2013. You need to go to File -> Export and then click on Create Handouts. Then click on the Create Handouts button and this will export the presentation to a Word Document

Now you can choose the page layout to be used in Microsoft Word. For example, to put the notes next to the slides, notes below the slides or blank lines below the slides instead of the text. You can also print the document outline.