Audience Handout Options In Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint audience handouts provide a way of giving the attendees of your presentations something to remember you by. They normally consist of printouts of the presentation; one, two, three, four six or nine slides to a page. Naturally, however, whether or not the essence of your presentation can be captured by this kind of printout depends on the nature of the presentation.

You will almost certainly want to personalize the look and feel of your handouts. To do this, click on the View tab of the PowerPoint ribbon and then click on the Handout Master button. In PowerPoint, masters allow you to determine the format of the three main elements within a presentation; slides, speaker notes and handouts. When you are in handout master mode, the Handout Master contextual tab appears. It contains a Page Setup section which allows you to choose the orientation of both the page as a whole and of the individual slide miniatures. It also contains buttons for activating or deactivating the header, footer, date and page number as well as for formatting the background of the slide.

Bear in mind that PowerPoint can produce three separate elements (slides, speaker notes and handouts). Therefore, when the print command is used, you need to specify which of these elements you wish to print. This is done by choosing an option from the Print What drop-down menu. In addition to the three elements mentioned above, you can also print the outline of the presentation.

For presentations containing a fair amount of important detail, it may be more useful to print out the slide outline and distribute it to the audience in place of PowerPoint’s usual handouts. Better still, you can export your presentation into Microsoft Word and then customise it for your audience. To export an outline, from the Office button, choose Publish and then Create Handouts in Microsoft Word.

Using the Create Handouts in Microsoft Word command brings up a dialogue box which allows you to choose one of five page layout options. Firstly, you can have speaker notes next to slides. This will create a two column layout with a slide miniature in column one and speaker notes next to it in column two. If you have used the speaker notes feature in your presentation, this may be a useful solution. The second option is Blank Lines Next to Slides: this produces the same two column layout as the first option but the right hand column is blank, so that you can enter notes next to each slide.

The options we have seen thus far don’t offer you much room for text. If you have made or wish to make extensive notes on each slide, options three and four (Notes below Slides and Blank lines below Slides) provide a layout with the text below the slide miniature and leaves approximately 60 percent of the page free for notes.

If you simply wish your audience to have a summary of the content of the presentation, you can choose the final option: Outline Only. This simply exports the text on each slide into Microsoft Word.

When exporting to Microsoft Word in this way, you have the option of activating Paste Link. This will create a link between the exported file and the original PowerPoint presentation, such that, if the presentation is modified, the exported Word file will also be updated.

Keyboard Shortcuts For Highlighting Text In Microsoft Word

As well as using the mouse, Microsoft Word 2007 contains a number of useful options for selecting text via the keyboard. Most of these options involve using the Shift key in conjunction with other keys. However, there are also some techniques which rely entirely on the keyboard.

Shift-click

One such technique is click followed by Shift-click. To use this technique, click to mark the start of the area that needs to be highlighted. Next, hold down the Shift key and click to mark the point where you want the highlighting to end. All text between the two clicks will then be highlighted.

Using Shift with the cursor keys

The Shift key can also be used in conjunction with the Control key. For example, beginning at the start of the document, if you hold down Control and Shift and press the right arrow, you will select word by word instead of character by character. Similarly if you press Control, Shift and the down arrow, you select paragraph by paragraph.

Using the Home and End keys

As well as using the cursor keys you can also use Home and End. For example, if the cursor is positioned in the middle of a line, pressing Shift and Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the line; while pressing Shift and End will select from the cursor position to the end of the line.

As well as using Shift, you can use Control-Shift. Control-Shift Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control-Shift end will select from the cursor position to the end of the document.

Making discontiguous selections

As well as using Shift, you can use Control-Shift. Control-Shift Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control-Shift end will select from the cursor position to the end of the document.

Making discontiguous selections

One final highlighting technique definitely worth mentioning is the use of the Control key in conjunction with the mouse. This enables you to make discontiguous selections: in other words, selection that have gaps. For example if we want to select just the headings in a particular document, you can drag across the first heading to select it; hold down the Control key and drag across each of the other headings. You will notice that the headings will be selected while the text between them is not. You can then change the format of your headings and none of the other text will affected.