Using annotated PPT slides as "handouts"

Depending on the situation, a handout — or "takeaway" — is a very good thing to distribute at the end of your talk. If you have a detailed handout of your material, you will not feel compelled to cram every slide full of reams of detail. The details after all are coming out of your mouth; the visuals support your talk. Presentations are dynamic, so perhaps you did not come to an important point in your presentation due to time constraints? If you included that point in your handout, you at least can refer to that before you close.

The best handout will be written as a separate document. But often we do not have time for that. In this case, if you annotated your slides in the notes view during the building of your presentation, you can simply go back and edit them, expanding when necessary, and clean them up for better reading. Printing out annotated slides may not be the best answer to the handout-creation dilemma, but this kind of handout will be much better than simply printing out a deck of bulletpoint-filled slides which are often impossible to decipher clean meaning from. And of course, if your slides were visuals only (usually the best use of PPT), they would have little meaning without either your narration or a clear written description and elaboration of your point.

Download sample_notes.pdf of an old presentation I did many years ago. You can see how I made a printable PDF in PowerPoint with the notes and slide both visible. If you have Acrobat Pro, you can get the file size way down. This file is a bit large since I made the PDF right within the OS.

Comments

[Steve Armstrong]

I set a goal for myself a few years back to put all my lecture notes into PPT form (math and computer science). The handout I give the students is a printout of the slides (six per page) they will see, only with blanks for strategic terms or phrases or with graphs which they will sketch after we determine together what they should be. If they had NO handout, those who did take notes would be scribbling furiously and missing the content. If they receive FULL copies of the slide, they are tempted to think, "Why write anything down, it's all here."

[Harry Smith]

I have a lot of lecturers here that do exactly that (re: Steve Armstrong), and I find the handouts are later completely useless. The general idea of filling in blanks is good, and makes me think more, but from straight PPT shows... BIG NO! The information you really need is never there, no matter how much info is crammed onto a slide.

Just for interests sake... why do I get the impression that the example notes were created in Pages?

[Rebecca Ryan]

This is the perfect answer for powerful take-aways. Often, meeting planners want your slide deck. But if your slide deck is well designed like Garr's, Steve's, Lawrence's (and eventually mine...?), the slides have very little text and very little after-meeting value because they lack the rich stories and anecdotes that surround the slide.

Designing annotated slides has two after-meeting values: (1) participants can refer back to your handout; AND (2) they can pass your handouts along to others, giving a lovely ripple of impact from your original presentation.

[Dean Baird]

I'm in education and of the opinion that you should never pass out 2-ups, 4-ups, or 6-ups (prints of slides, annotated slides, etc.).

Rather, design the student document first, then design the preso to support the document. The student document should act as a springboard for Socratic discussion.

I have never seen a preso that
1. involved the use of X-up annotated slide prints AND
2. was any good.

[alline burley]

I have experience both power point presentation and documents that co-respond to the power point presentation, and I think if you're going to do a power point presentation that you should also give documents of the presentation so the people and go back over what was discuss.

[Earlena Leonard]

I am an accountant's assistant and use PPT all the time. The fact of understanding what you put down is important and should always be looked into.

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This is a good article to reflect on.

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I am an accountant's assistant and use PPT all the time. The fact of understanding what you put down is important and should always be looked into

[Mauricio Gonzlez]

I like the article,but being honest I never had used ppt.I would like to learn how to use.