In PowerPoint you can print notes pages, slides (one slide per page) and handouts of your presentation. A presentation that has been printed out allows your audience to follow along as you give your presentation and to gives them a record to refer to after the presentation. Before you print anything, you need to prepare your presentation by setting the slide size, page orientation, and starting slide number. Click Design > Page Setup > Page Setup, and in the Page Setup dialogue we can change things like the slide orientation (portrait or landscape) and also the dimensions of the printable area.
The Slides sized for drop down list allows you to select some commonly used sizes for printouts, but you can also change the width and height manually using their respective input boxes. If you want to print an overhead transparency, select overhead from the Slides sized for list. The Number slides from box allows you to change what page number prints on the very first slide or handout.
By default, PowerPoint slide layouts appear in landscape orientation but you can change this using the Page Setup or Slide Orientation button.
Printing The Presentation
Once you have made all the preliminary preparations outlined above, you are ready to print. Click File > Print
On this panel you can specify how many copies you want to print and using what printer. If you want to print only a selection of slides in the presentation, you can use the Slides drop down list to select one of:
- Print All Slides
- Print Selection (only prints the slides you have selected)
- Print Current Slide
- Custom Range (then use the Slides input box below to type in the page numbers you want to print)
The next drop down list allows you to select full page slides, notes pages or the presentation's outline to print, or if you want to print handouts you can specify how many slides per page.
Moving down, you can choose to print your presentation on one slide only or on both sides of the paper. If printing on both sides you can select which edge (the short or long edge) of the paper separates consecutive pages.
The remaining selections allow you to choose whether to collate your printouts and whether to print in colour, grayscale or in black and white. There is also a sneaky little link at the bottom for editing header and footer details. Once all teh settings have been addressed, click the big Print button at the top.