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Modifying Handouts and Notes Pages with Microsoft Word
If you are frustrated with the lack of flexibility in customizing handouts and notes pages (especially handouts), don't give up just yet. There's a whole new world of formatting awaiting you if you send your handouts over to Microsoft Word and format them there.
Sending Handouts or Notes Pages to Word
Assuming you have Word installed, your first step is to send the slides from PowerPoint into Word in a specific handout or notes page format.Follow these steps:
Choose File⇨Send To⇨Microsoft Office Word. The Send to Microsoft Office Word dialog box appears.
Choose one of the formats (see Figure 16-8).
Choose either Paste or Paste Link. The latter maintains a link between PowerPoint and the Word document so that if you make changes in PowerPoint, the Word document will update too so you can reprint a fresh set of handouts. I don't usually recommend using linking, but in this case I do. One limitation: if you add, rearrange, or delete slides, the Send to Word link will ignore those changes.
Click OK. Word opens, and the slides appear in the format you chose.
Figure 16-8: Choose a format for sending the presentation to Word.
Editing Handouts or Notes Pages in Word
The slides appear in Word as a table (see Figure 16-9). You can do anything to this table that you can do to other Word tables.
Figure 16-9: Format handouts in Word.
| Note | If you don't see the table gridlines as shown in Figure 16-9, but want to, choose Table⇨Show Gridlines. |
"Like what?" you might be asking. Well okay, here is a sampler of some of the things you can do to your handouts in Word.
CHANGE THE MARGINS
One benefit of exporting handouts to Word is being able to change the margins. Choose File⇨Page Setup, and on the Margins tab, enter new values for the Left, Right, Top, and Bottom margins (see Figure 16-10).
Figure 16-10: Change page margins in Word.
Note, however, that changing the page margins does not resize the table. If you change the left margin, the table may start at a different place in relation to the left margin (because the table is left-aligned), but if you want to increase the margins so that you can increase the table width, those are two separate activities.You can also set internal margins for a row, columns, or cell. To do so, click inside the cell and choose Table⇨Format Table. Click the Cell tab, then click the Options button, and in the dialog box that appears you can set margins within that cell. This can be used to create "padding" between two cells.
CHANGE THE TABLE ALIGNMENT
The table itself has a default alignment in relationship to the page: top/left. If you prefer the look of a centered table, you may want to switch this to middle/center.First, select the table as a whole. To do this, click the square above and to the left of the table with the four-headed arrow in it (see Figure 16-11). Then click the Center button on the Formatting toolbar to center the table horizontally on the page.
Figure 16-11: Select the whole table and then center it horizontally.
Centering the table vertically requires you to set the entire document (or document section) to center alignment. To do so, choose File⇨Page Setup, click the Layout tab, and set the Vertical Alignment setting to Center.
CHANGE ALIGNMENT WITHIN A CELL
To center the content within a cell horizontally, click in that cell and use the Center button on the toolbar. To center within a cell vertically, click in the cell and choose Table⇨Table Properties. Then, on the Cell tab choose a vertical alignment.Alternatively, you can display the Tables and Borders toolbar (View⇨Toolbars⇨Tables and Borders) and use the Alignment drop-down list to choose both vertical and horizontal alignments at once for the selected cell(s) (see Figure 16-12).
Figure 16-12: The Tables and Borders toolbar offers a convenient menu for choosing both vertical and horizontal alignment at once.
RESIZE ROWS AND COLUMNS
To resize a column, drag the border between that column and the one to its right. To resize a row, drag the border between that row and the one beneath it. Alternatively, you can specify an exact size by right-clicking and choosing Format Table and then entering a preferred size on the Row or Column tab.
To make all rows or all columns the same size, select them as a group and then right-click and choose Distribute Rows Evenly or Distribute Columns Evenly.
| Note | You will not be able to resize a row or column such that its text content no longer fits. (And the lines for the audience to write on arecomprised of underline characters, which are considered text.) Therefore, you may find yourself needing to resize the content or even delete some of it. For example, if you use a layout that includes blank lines, you'll get several blank lines in some of the cells. To make these cells narrower, you would need to decrease the length of the lines first. To make these cells shorter, you might have to delete one or more of the lines. |
TURN ON/OFF CELL BORDERS
By default, all borders are turned off for all cells in the table. You can turn them on in a variety of ways, but perhaps the easiest is to select the cell(s) and then use the Border button on the Formatting toolbar to select a border for one or more sides of it (see Figure 16-13). Choose the button that has no borders (all dotted lines) to turn all borders off again.
Figure 16-13: The Borders button on the Formatting toolbar has a drop-down list of border sides to turn on/off.
To get fancier with borders, select some cells, choose Format⇨Borders and Shading, and then click the Border tab.
| Note | One thing to note about these borders is that whatever you choose applies to the selected range, not to the individual cells. For example, suppose you chose a range of cells containing three rows and applied a bottom border. The border would be applied only to the bottom of the bottom row of cells. |
APPLY A BACKGROUND
To apply a background to the entire page, choose Format⇨Background. A palette of colors appears. The choices are much the same as in PowerPoint except there aren't scheme colors (since Word doesn't use color schemes).To apply a background to only certain cells, select the cells and then choose Format⇨Borders and Shading. Choose a shading on the Shading tab. This is a lot like applying shading to an object such as an AutoShape in PowerPoint.
RESIZE THE GRAPHIC IMAGES
Resizing the slide images is one of the most common reasons why people export their PowerPoint handouts to Word. Each image is resizable individually, so they need not necessarily be all the same size (although it usually looks better if they are).If you would like to make the slides larger, you will probably need to first increase the column width for the column in which they reside. Then drag the selection handles on the slide thumbnail to resize. Or, if you want a precise size, choose Format⇨Object and change the size on the Size tab of the dialog box that appears.
| Tip | If you want to resize all the slide images and you want them all to be the same size, use the Format⇨Object method and enter a precise size for each one. Un-fortunately, you cannot do them as a batch; each must be resized individually. However, if you have a lot of them to do, you can save yourself some time by writing a macro that resizes to a certain size. Then, just select an image and run the macro. Or go on, and then select the next image and use Edit⇨Repeat (Ctrl+Y or F4). |
REMOVE A COLUMN OR ROW
You can remove rows and columns as with any other table. For example, perhaps you don't want the leftmost column from Figure 16-9 that had Slide 1, Slide 2, and so on in it.To delete a column, point to the top border of the top cell. The mouse pointer turns into a down-pointing black arrow. Then, click to select the entire column and cut it with Ctrl+X or Edit⇨Cut.Another method is to click anywhere within that column and then choose Table⇨Delete ⇨Columns.This works with rows too except you point to the left border of the leftmost cell until you see a right-pointing black arrow. Then click to select the entire row and press Ctrl+X. Or choose Table⇨Delete⇨Rows.
ADD A COLUMN OR ROW
To add a column or row, click in an existing column or row and then choose Table⇨Insert and then Columns to the Left, Columns to the Right, Rows Above, or Rows Below. To insert more than one at once, select more than one before issuing the command.
| Tip | To extract embedded PowerPoint slides from a Word document and save them as presentation, go to www.mvps.org/skp/pptxp010, copy the macro you find there, and run it in Word. |
