PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Creating and Printing Handouts

You don't have to do anything special to create handouts in PowerPoint. That's because handouts in PowerPoint are nothing more than slides printed one or more to a page.

FROM THE FIELD: Handouts: Killing Trees Unnecessarily?

If you think your audience will benefit from printouts of your slides, then by all means, go for it. Say your presentation slides consist of graphic images accompanied by a few well-placed questions. What you want is a participatory, interactive presentation. Your audience should listen to you and jot down the answers to those questions—and what better way to encourage this interaction than to pass out hard copies of each slide?

But for some presentations, slide printouts are pretty worthless. Instead, you're going to want to give your audience printouts containing facts, figures, contact information, and other in-depth supporting information that you didn't have room for in your actual presentation.

One way to jump-start the process of creating truly useful handouts is to pull your PowerPoint presentation text into Word 2007 (assuming you have a copy installed on your computer). Using your presentation text as a starting point, you can add information until you've built handouts your audience will actually take back to their homes and offices.

To pull your slides into a Word document, click Office button → Publish → Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word.

To print handouts:

1. Select Office button → Print → Print Preview.

   The Print Preview ribbon appears, and PowerPoint's best guess at how you want your handouts printed appears in the workspace.

2. Click the "Print what" drop-down box and then, from the menu that appears, choose how you want PowerPoint to print your handouts (Figure 1-25).

   PowerPoint redisplays the handouts preview based on your selection.

   

   Figure 1-25. You can tell PowerPoint to print up to nine slides per page. Here, you see the effect of printing three per page, which is a nice compromise: large enough to read the slides, but roomy enough for note taking.

3. Click Print.

   The familiar Print dialog box appears.

   Note

   Chapter 8, which shows you how to print your presentation, walks you through the Print dialog box step by step.

4. Click OK.

   PowerPoint prints your handouts.

5. Click Close Print Preview (Figure 1-25) to dismiss the Print Preview ribbon and return to your workspace.