Monthly Archives: May 2026

Before diving into Presenter View’s display of Presenter Notes, let’s first look at PowerPoint’s Notes Master.

This is where the slide and Presenter Notes are merged for print. But, really, it’s another “hidden” function within PowerPoint that few know about, and even fewer consider customizing. 

Each Master Slide in a PowerPoint file has a Notes layout, which is used for printing slide notes pages. The Microsoft default layout has a fairly large image, or thumbnail, of the slide, and a text box below it for the Presenter Notes using the same font as the master slide text and sized at 12 point. Along with the Header, Footer, date, and page number placeholders in the 4 corners of the page.  

[image of default notes layout showing the placeholders] 

To access the Notes Master, go to the VIEW tab > MASTER VIEWS section > and click the NOTES MASTER icon. 

Note: To close the Notes Master and return to the slides, go to the HANDOUT MASTER tab > CLOSE section > click the CLOSE icon. 

For TLC Creative, we have our own version of Notes Master layout that we like, and it is included on all PowerPoint templates we create. 

• Smaller and positioned higher slide image 

• Larger text box 

• Preset bullets, font sizes, line & paragraph spacing 

• Date moved to the lower left 

• Footer centered at the bottom of the page 

• Header and page number placeholders stay in their respective corners 

A special note is that if a presentation has multiple master slides, each master slide has its own Notes Master. This is important for slide deck printouts where formatting of each Notes Master needs to be reviewed to ensure the Notes View printout is consistent. 

So… how does this relate to using Presenter View when presenting? We will address that in the next post! 

Troy @ TLC Creative

…

The TLC Creative Services design team receives presentation slides continuously as part of design projects, presentation makeover projects, and to run for live corporate event projects. This is a nice graphic that was core to a recent event (eg. I received the presentation at an event and had nothing to do with the presentation design).

THE ASK, THE PROBLEM

– First was an ask to animate the graphic, which was not possible as it was inserted into the presentation as a flat raster image (e.g. a JPG image). Inserting as a vector .svg would have been great!

– Second, and only because I was asked to work with the graphic did I take a closer look, and then discovered (and called out) the problem… do you see it?

Note: by the time I was working with this graphic, it had already been used in presentations, other attendee collateral, and a website… I am certain it was reviewed and vetted by multiple people, all of whom were asked to approve the graphic.

There is an important, real-world lesson here. Even with multiple layers of reviewing and proofing, typos happen!

Time’s up! Did you spot the typo? “DRVIEN”

I am guessing the typo would’ve been caught had it been the only graphic on the slide. However, in this case, the word “DRIVEN” is just one element in a busy graphic – and I was looking at it on a busy slide with several other text boxes. And all that ‘other’ text pulled attention away from this circle graphic.

THE EMERGENCY FIX

Having this graphic as an .SVG on the slide would have solved many problems. It could have been ungrouped and animated, which was the original request. It also could have been ungrouped and then modified to fix the typo.

Since the source art was not going to be available in time for that day’s meeting, I did some Photoshop work and produced a “fixed” version of the graphic – at least the graphic used in the presentation I was running was fixed!

-Troy @ TLC Creative