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Spelling mistakes are bad. But there’s nothing worse than standing in front of a large audience, looking up at your slide, and fumbling for words because you have no idea why you created the slide in the first place.

Fortunately, PowerPoint lets you add personal notes to your slide … text that only you get to see. This allows you to plan out your presentation and outline what you are actually going to say during the show (for example: “tell joke about priest and the rabbi”). Another nice aspect of these notes is that they will remind you of what you were thinking in the future – especially useful when you have to repeat a presentation many months later.

To add notes, simply type into the notes pane at the bottom of the screen. You can increase the size of this area by dragging the divider bar. If you plan on writing a lot of notes, you may want to switch to the “notes view” layout. Go to the menu bar and click [View - NotesPage]

How are you going to see these notes?
This is a tricky question, and depends upon where you give your presentation. The easiest way to view your notes is to simply print them out before the presentation and look at these paper notes while you speak. This is the most reliable way, and how I generally bring notes to a presentation, though it tends to use up a lot of paper. Sometimes I won’t write any notes at all, but will print up the outline for my presentation, and pencil in notes directly onto this.

If you are in a big auditorium that is specifically set up for PowerPoint, they may have a computer with dual-monitor support. This allows you to project your presentation on the big projector screen, and still see your notes on a small computer monitor built into the podium. It takes a little know-how to set this up, and most of these auditoriums will have support-staff that can set this up for you.

Note: Whenever possible, it’s best to run your show from your own laptop. An auditorium’s computer might not have the latest version of PowerPoint. It also might be too slow (or not have the correct software) to play advanced objects like videos and animations.

Next: Chapter 4: Adding pictures to your show ...
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