Extra Credit: Creating Top-Notch Notes and Handouts

PowerPoint’s canned layouts for speaker notes and handouts have the singular advantage of being easy to use. If you just want your audience to have a place to scribble notes about your talk, these basic templates will do the trick.

But for truly professional-looking leave-behinds, consider sending the presentation to Word, which offers much better formatting and printing options than the basic notes and handout layouts in PowerPoint. After polishing your presentation to perfection, click the Microsoft Office button, click Publish, and then choose Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word. Using the choices in the Send to Microsoft Office Word dialog box, Word creates a new document with blank lines next to the thumbnails, in a format suitable for handouts (see Figure 18.20).