Notes Pane in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Introducing the Notes Pane
Adding Notes
Working with Notes

Introducing the Notes Pane

The Notes Pane is the area that has been highlighted in red within Figure 1 -- right below the actual slide. This area provides space to add speaker's notes that can be so helpful to the presenter while presenting -- the Notes Pane can be also used to write any sort of information about the presentation or individual slides. When there are no notes added for a particular slide, the Notes Pane just displays the "Click to add notes " boilerplate text.

Figure 1 shows the Notes Pane in the PowerPoint 2011 interface. The Notes Pane is an important part of PowerPoint's tri-pane interface consisting of the Slides/Outline pane, the Slide itself, and the Notes Pane.

Figure 1: Notes Pane

Remember, each individual slide in your presentation contains notes associated with it -- so whatever you have in the Notes Pane area for any given slide will not show up for any other slide.

Adding Notes

The Notes Pane can be seen in both Normal and Notes Page views. Notes also show up in Presenter View, but cannot be edited while in this view.

Follow these steps to enter text in the Notes Pane in Normal view:

1. Create a new presentation, or open an existing presentation in PowerPoint 2011 (see Figure 2). Select any slide for which you want to add some notes.
2. 
   Figure 2: Open presentation
2. Now click inside Notes Pane to make it active -- the "Click to add notes" boilerplate text disappears as shown in Figure 3.
3. 
   Figure 3: Add notes
3. Now type in some text in the Notes Pane. Figure 4 shows notes added for one of the slides.
4. 
   Figure 4: Notes added
4. Remember to save your presentation so that the notes are saved within the presentation!

Working with Notes

Here are a few guidelines / tips / thoughts on working with both the Notes Pane and the actual notes:

• You can do basic text formatting in the Notes Pane by using bullets and non-bulleted lists -- or just use plain sentences.
• To insert pictures in the Notes area, go to Notes Page view by selecting the View | Notes Page menu option. You'll find that you can also do all sorts of text and picture formatting in the Notes Page -- but these won't show up within the Notes Pane in Normal view.
• The Notes Master does not change the appearance of your content within the Notes pane, and is intended to infuence the Notes pages instead. You can make several changes within the Notes Master, such as changing the Background Style of printed Notes pages. To access the Notes Master, choose the View | Master | Notes Master option.
• You can choose to print just the notes for the entire presentation by choosing the Notes pages option in the default Print dialog box.