Notes Pane in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Introducing the Notes Pane
Adding Notes
Working with Notes

Introducing the Notes Pane

PowerPoint 2013's tri-paned interface has three regions: the Slides Pane, the Slide Area, and the Notes Pane. The Notes Pane is placed right below the Slide area, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1. The Notes Pane provides space to add speaker's notes that can be so helpful to the presenter while presenting - you can also write any sort of information about the presentation or individual slide.

By default, the Notes Pane may be completely empty -- you may also see some boilerplate text such as "Click to add notes", as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Notes Pane in PowerPoint 2013

To add your notes in this area, you typically just insert your cursor on the boilerplate text and start typing -- we explain this in more detail within the next section.

What's important to realize is that each slide in your presentation has its own notes. When you navigate to another slide, you will have to add more notes relevant to the active slide.

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Adding Notes

The Notes Pane can be seen in both Normal and Notes Page views. It also shows up in Presenter View. Follow these steps to enter text in the Notes Pane in Normal View:

Create a new presentation, or open an existing presentation -- and select the slide for which you want to add some notes, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Slide selected
Now click within the Notes Pane to make it active -- notice that the "Click to add notes" boilerplate text disappears (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Add text within Notes Pane
Now, type in some text. Figure 4 shows text added to the Notes Pane.

Figure 4: Notes added for the selected slide

Tip: If you already created notes in another application, you can also paste them within the Notes Pane.
Remember to save your presentation so that the notes are saved within the!

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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 on bulleted and non-bulleted lists, and also on plain sentences.
To insert pictures in the Notes area, go to Notes Page view by selecting the View tab of the Ribbon, and then choosing Notes Page. 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.
You can change the look of your Notes pages by working with the Notes Master -- here you can also change the Background Style.
You can choose to print just the notes for the entire presentation by choosing the Notes pages option in the default Print dialog box.

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