how to hide notes on powerpoint presentations

how to hide notes on powerpoint presentations

Effective Strategies for Hiding Notes on PowerPoint Presentations

1. Introduction to PowerPoint Notes

PowerPoint notes are a series of slide thumbnails that appear beside a thumbnail or a number of slide thumbnails when you play a presentation on the second monitor. The notes page in PowerPoint and PDF files includes the speaker notes, and some like to fill it with speaker notes that cannot be displayed in public. In formal speech or reports including PowerPoint files, this is usually a problem when you wish to print out lecture handouts. The problem is that many people post these lecture handouts after class, as I mentioned, PowerPoint and PDF files cannot be released without students’ permission. Today, I would like to introduce several strategies to hide notes from PowerPoint files and the processes each strategy goes through.

When you need to attach speaker notes to connotation, for example, when printing PowerPoint speaker notes, you need to attach the speaker notes to the PowerPoint presentation. Typically, the speaker notes are hidden below the slide. In normal mode, other people cannot see the notes page. In presentation mode, the notes page is only displayed on the second monitor. In this way, you can print PowerPoint speaker notes together with your presentation handout. If you want to show the notes page with the PPT file to avoid showing sensitive content, you can move, resize the placeholder of the notes page, or change the PowerPoint notes font into black or white, to hide the notes in a darker background or lighter background on the slide.

2. Methods for Hiding Notes in PowerPoint

In PowerPoint, there are a few different ways to hide your presentation notes. One way to do this is to switch off the notes in the software to prevent them from being visible to you as the presenter. Another possible method is to export your notes pages to a file, after which you can delete the notes from the original presentation. More advanced strategies for hiding your notes involve utilization of additional software or add-ins, such as Discover’s Slide Control add-in for PowerPoint, to conceal your notes.

The need to hide notes in PowerPoint presentations typically arises from a desire to keep them private. Notes can be a helpful resource for speakers in a presentation, who can use them for cues during the speech or to provide extra detail or support information to the audience. However, in some presentations, notes are a distraction from the main point of the presentation and are not being used by the speaker. Hiding notes can also be helpful in other situations, such as when sharing a lightly briefed deck with an internal team or with other meeting participants to keep background from being unnecessarily shared with the group. When showing the presentation in Slide Show view, your notes will not be present if you have them hidden, revising the presentable format of your original notes and slides.

3. Best Practices for Using Hidden Notes in Presentations

Incorporating hidden notes in PowerPoint presentations is a powerful method for aiding in the facilitation of a presentation, and there are several best practices to follow for creating useful notes and maximizing this advantage.

Similar to a physical set of notes, they are best created in small enough bites so that the spoken information corresponds to the written information on the slide. Additionally, many presenters find it most effective to work from very specific notes initially and gradually give the abandoned bullet points of the slide, but hidden notes can be created to facilitate a number of different behaviors. Because hidden notes can become quite long when transcribed in full, they are typically used for detailed instructions or information that supports handouts but are not intended to be printed with slides. Because the printing of notes has already been possible in previous versions of PowerPoint, at any time the instructor can choose to supplement the information in the handouts dispensing hidden information on slides with notes available within simple steps using an assumed handout that comprises all the slides. Users can also add handouts utilizing software like Microsoft Word for any desired configurations, as you can copy and paste text from slides, and that Word has built-in layout options and additional features like a table of contents.

One way to create hidden notes that differ from the regular speaker notes is to provide more explicit details for the speaker. For example, a hidden note can use clear transitions and directives, such as “Tell the class that we are moving on to method 2 now.” Methods such as these reduce the need for a presenter to have to remember very detailed instructions, as they are available right in their slides; greater detail can also solidify who needs to be coordinating advanced audio-visual elements in the classroom (e.g. advancing slides, raising a hand to change microphones) which is particularly important in a distance-teaching environment or when there is a presenter on stage and an off-stage audio-visual team. Some presenters may have shortcuts that allow them to glance at a slide and verbally anchor without needing hidden notes, but others will find a more detailed set of notes in their works best for them. Hidden notes are typically used to create notes specific to a shared presentation delivery strategy or something asked to be read aloud. It’s usually not recommended to automatically read the slides or have the exact same word written in hidden notes as visible notes unless it quite explicitly indicates a speaker’s note for things such as “(pause for effect)” or, we are using a list of tips or items “supplement information about…” that is too verbose to include on slides. If you set autoplay voiceover using hidden notes, it could be challenging to modulate the rate of slide delivery. If set to a reading speed so that PowerPoint automatically advances slides which contain paragraphs within hidden notes, but the speaker swiftly elaborates on a comment in a hidden note, the automatic advance of slides must be overridden using the “B” key. It’s generally a good idea to occasionally practice hidden autoflow autoplay to get a sense of how to deliver talks within some of these constraints, especially with longer hidden notes. Ideally, use a mix of visible bullet points and expanded text using hidden notes to facilitate an engaging discussion of slide content.

4. Advanced Techniques for Securing Notes in PowerPoint

There are methods that are more advanced for those who are willing to protect the Notes pane data in PowerPoint. If the traditional method is not enough, you can use WordPad for a digital command line and word processing software. A WordPad file is basically a rich-text .rtf file which supports text formatting and images. After typing text, including notes body, in your WordPad document, you can encrypt it with a 3rd-party encrypting tool and save the document. Another way of securing your notes is by hiding the .rtf file (e.g., using Steganography) and protecting it with a password. Steganography is the practice of concealing content in a non-secret file or message to maintain data confidentiality or prevent certain information from detection.

There are vulnerabilities and risks in these methods, such as the revealing of the .rtf file, which may be unable to remain undiscovered as some software would detect the file. A password-encrypted file will also have a risk of being cracked. PowerPoint also enables the ‘password to modify’ option, making your presentation only readable by someone who has no password. Keep your Password to Modify (read/write password) and Password to Open (read-only password) different from the secrecy intention. If additional effort is required to secure it, someone else can crack the confidential data for special purposes. Finally, 3rd-party encrypting tools may reveal your encryption algorithm and key to some extent. For this kind of situation, you can use 3rd-party encrypting tools whose algorithm is not well-known. You can also manually make changes (e.g., adding symbols or emendation) manually into your raw material data encrypted in WordPad, citing the exact location of the text. To the best of our knowledge, our methods presented here are (nearly) secure enough for most organizational and individual purposes.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

In this work, I discussed some effective strategies for hiding notes on PowerPoint presentations, which have many potential benefits, such as helping prioritize students’ cognitive load, minimizing verbatim transcription of slides, and promoting learning through note-taking. I gave an overview of why and how to hide notes, and also important practical applications of PowerPoint, including techniques that have proven useful in hiding notes to make worksheets and tests. I further explored the results from an initial study that turned off notes from weekly PowerPoint slide decks and also forbade electronic devices. An open-ended survey administered at the end of the semester showed that students were indifferent. In addition, some exceptions were noted, and future replications and assessments that could lead to replications were discussed. Finally, I described some recommendations for educators looking to use these techniques in their classes and identified some next steps to streamline the report towards publication.

We discussed the potential advantages of the effective use of psychological principles in instructing and testing students and presented ways to incorporate these techniques in assessments and instruction. After all, we described theoretical considerations from the study of the science of learning that influenced our teaching modules. In-Class Technology Intervention to optimize a PowerPoint deck for student note-taking such that a one-page, seven-slide PowerPoint handout contained useful words for taking notes while complete sentences and important details and conclusions were omitted. This strength in decreasing the empirical word count may also encourage students to go into more detail exterior to the slides during the in-class discussion of a study, although we are not able to determine what students actually did during these class discussions. Further work could explore the cognitive load differences of students that occurred from using the PowerPoint slides. In summary, we approached this study as teaching modules, combining our expertise with the relevant scientific literature in the hope to inspire other instructors to replicate our teaching design and share their similar work with the community.