There are two modes in which notes can be added and edited within PowerPoint. Firstly, in normal view, the speaker notes pane is displayed below the slide preview on the right of your screen. Simply click to position the cursor in the speaker notes pane and edited the notes as required. You can also drag the resize bar at the bottom of the workspace to increase the size of the speaker notes pane.

If you wish to focus on the notes themselves, in the View tab of the PowerPoint ribbon, click on the Notes Page View icon. This gives you a print preview of what your notes will look like when printed and allows you to edit the notes at the same time.

Finally, to control the appearance of the speaker notes when printed, you can customise the Notes Master. Masters are a feature of PowerPoint which allows you to customise the format of elements within a presentation by modifying a single master element. By default, the notes master features a miniature of the slide at the top of the page and the notes area at the bottom. It also features a header and footer, the date and page number. You can drag and resize these elements as you see fit. For example, you might make the slide smaller and increase the size of the notes text block or you might move the notes text above the slide.

The author is a trainer and computer consultant with Macresource Computer Training, a UK IT training company offering Microsoft PowerPoint courses in London and throughout the UK.