Creating Speaker Notes
Speaker notes are like handouts, but they're for the speaker. Only one printout format is available for them, consisting of a slide on the top half (the same size as in the two-slides-per-page handout) with the blank space below it for the speaker notes.Speaker notes printed in PowerPoint are better than traditional note cards for several reasons. For one thing, you can type your notes right into the computer and print them out on regular paper. There's no need to jam a note card into a typewriter. The other benefit is that each note page contains a picture of the slide so it's not as easy to lose your place while speaking.
Entering Speaker Notes in PowerPoint
You can type your notes for a slide in Normal view in the notes pane, or in Notes Page view. To switch to Notes Page view, choose View⇨Notes page (see Figure 16-6).
Figure 16-6: Notes Page view lets you type your notes in a big text box and see how each notes page will look when printed.
Working with the Notes Master
The Notes Master is like the other masters except it applies to the Notes Pages printout. It's more flexible than the Handout Master in that you can resize and reposition the slide placeholder and the text box.Choose View⇨Master⇨Notes Master, and then edit the layout as you have learned with the other masters (see Figure 16-7). Here are some ideas:
Resize and reposition the slide placeholder if desired. It has normal round white selection handles, just like any other object.
Resize and reposition the text box placeholder, if desired. For example, if you have so many notes that some of them won't fit on a single page, enlarging the box may help.
Add clip art or some other graphic to the background or border.
Add a colored, textured, or patterned background to the page. (Remember though that it will take more ink to print it.)
Delete or move the header and footer placeholders, as you did with the Handout Master earlier in the chapter.
Figure 16-7: Edit the layout of notes pages in Notes Master view.