This article was originally posted on Online Tech Tips (Copyright 2007, Assem Kishore)

Although PowerPoint is electronic slide creation software, printable handouts serve an important role both for the presenter and an audience. In this article, we’ll discuss your options for creating great PowerPoint handouts and purpose behind doing so in the first place.

Why Create PowerPoint Handouts?

Since PowerPoint is a software program designed to create electronic slide presentations, it may appear counter-intuitive to create printable handouts from your finished presentation. However, there are three main reasons you should consider creating handouts.

First, if your presentation’s content is particularly complex, offering printed handouts to your audience can help your audience members keep track of where you are in the presentation to keep them informed and up to speed.

Second, every audience member can walk away from your presentation with the handouts for inspection later. This way, you don’t have to rely on your audience members’ memories to ensure they understood the message of your presentation.

Finally, if your presentation has any call to action items in it, printed handouts can remind your audience not only about the fact there is a call to action but also what they action was. This can help ensure that your presentation has a bigger impact on your audience again without having to rely on the audience’s memory.

How to Create PowerPoint Handouts

Open any PowerPoint presentation you have created and click on the View tab on the Ribbon. With the View tab active, click on the button labeled Handout Masterin the section titled Presentation Views.

You’ll notice that there is a new tab on the Ribbon labeled Handout Master. This is the tab that contains all of the handout options available to you in PowerPoint. Notice that by default, PowerPoint places six slides per page. Although this is usually a good choice, you need to decide whether this is the best layout for your handouts.

If your slides contain very basic information in large fonts, you may opt to change the number of slides per page to nine. If your slides contain detailed information such as charts or small type, you should choose a lower number of slides per page such as four or two.

Rarely should you choose one slide per page unless your slides contain very detailed information that is vital to the presentation. To change the number of slides per page, click on the button labeled Slides Per Page and make your choice.

Another important choice to make when it comes to PowerPoint handouts is the orientation of the page. By default, PowerPoint offers you a portrait page orientation.

However, since PowerPoint slides are almost always wider than they are tall, landscape orientation makes more sense. To change the orientation of your slides from portrait to landscape, click the button labeled Handout Orientation and choose Landscape from the menu.

To the far right of the Ribbon, you will notice a button labeled Page Setup. Much like a Word document, this is where you can change the margins and dimensions of the page.

How you change these variables for your handouts should be determined by how your slides are laid out and what information each slide contains. Make sure your slides are readable based on how small of a font you used and the complexity of the content on the slides.

On the Placeholders section of the Ribbon, you can choose to add several options to your PowerPoint handouts including a Header, Footer, Date, and Page Number. A header or footer is a great place to put the title of your presentation and your name so people will know who created the handouts and who delivered the presentation.

Page numbers are a matter of preference but make a great way to help the audience find specific slides since you have a way to refer to which page a slide resides. Adding a date to your handouts is a good idea so people remember when they saw you give your presentation.

The Edit Theme section of the Ribbon offers you an opportunity to setup the basic theme of your handouts. Keep in mind, however, that this will not change the theme of your electronic version of your presentation.

It turns out that themes that look great on a screen do not always print well. Using the Edit Theme section of the Ribbon, you can change the theme to a more printer-friendly version.

When choosing a theme for your handouts, remember that color slides do not look the same on paper when printed in black and white. Test your handout theme on a monochrome printer before making your final decision.

The Background section of the Ribbon lets you change the background printed on the handouts. Keep in mind that choosing a background for your handouts does not change the electronic version of your presentation; these backgrounds are applied to your handouts only.

Generally, few people choose a background for PowerPoint handouts because it creates an unprofessional appearance, detracts from the content of your printed slides, and wastes toner/ink when printed.

For these reasons, choose wisely if you decide to add a background to your PowerPoint handouts. Notice that there is also a button to Hide BackgroundGraphics while working on your handouts.

When you are done choosing the handout options for your PowerPoint presentation, click the Close Master View button and you are done. If you take the advice offered above seriously about creating readable and functional handouts, you should now have a nice set of PowerPoint handouts to offer your audience members.

 

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Despite living in the age of e-mail, wireless networks, smartphones, and tablets, many small businesses are still beholden to paper. There are a variety of reasons for this. Often, it's the other businesses or government agencies that you interface with that demand paper forms or faxes. Sometimes, it's just that old habits die hard.

However, there are software solutions to some old paper problems that don't require the network infrastructure of a large corporation. And making a small technology investment now could save your business a bundle long-term not to mention reducing its wasteful reliance on paper products.

The standard in PDF editing software, Adobe Acrobat, will run you $299 for an individual license, but there are alternatives. One of them is NitroPDF, an extremely powerful editor that starts at $99 for a single license. With it, you can easily create PDF forms that clients can view and complete with standard software, like Adobe reader and most web browsers. You can also edit existing PDF documents without resorting to printing and white-out.

Another great paper-saving feature is the built-in and extremely stable PDF printer driver. Instead of sending that important e-mail or website to your laserjet, select Nitro's printer option and generate a full-color PDF that you can archive digitally on your hard drive and in the cloud (more on that below).

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On the topic of PDF printing, if you don't need the full editing suite that comes with NitroPDF, but you're looking for a way to render important documents as PDFs, check out PDF995. It's a PDF printer driver, plain and simple no user interface or controls. Simply install it and it will add a PDF option to the print menu of all your applications.

A PDF printer driver is an excellent way to digitally render invoices, graphic mock-ups, and long text documents that you'd like clients to read, but not change all without ever touching a piece of paper or a scanner.

PDF995 is free, but it is ad supported. Whenever you generate a PDF, a small pop-up window will appear in your default browser, which you can simply close when the file is done rendering. It may take a few seconds of your time for each one, but it's a small drawback for an excellent free product.

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In the words of Michael Scott from NBC's comedy The Office, "Fax? Why don't you just send it over on a dinosaur?"

Indeed, there is little excuse for using a fax machine in 2010, but many businesses do so because other businesses they correspond with, including the U.S. government especially, still rely on the technology. Your business can break this vicious cycle (and save piles of paper in the process) by switching your fax number over to an e-mail conversion service.

Setting up an account will assign a new fax number, ideally in your business's area code, and use a web or e-mail interface to send and receive faxes as PDF files. New faxes will come directly to your inbox instead of that paper-spewing fail machine in the break room.

Some of the leading fax to e-mail services include:

Rates and features vary between services, so investigating how much faxing you plan to do each month is worthwhile. Additionally, if you already host your website and/or business e-mail with GoDaddy.com, they offer an integrated fax to e-mail feature for an added monthly fee.

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Nearly every type of business, from a law firm, to a construction company, to a lone freelance designer, should be using contract agreements to legally protect itself from issues with clients and other businesses. Typically, this means generating paper and gathering a signature in ink, either by mail (even more paper) or in person.

But for over 10 years, e-signatures have been equally binding under the law, and a few companies have made the process of creating and sending secure electronic agreements very efficient.

One of them is EchoSign, a feature-rich and user friendly service for generating and archiving digital contracts. If you're already working with a paper version of your business agreement, simply upload it to EchoSign and enter the recipient's e-mail address. They will receive a copy of the document with a link where they can e-sign. The executed contract is stored in your EchoSign account for reference. The software is completely web-based, so there's nothing to install, and you can access your documents from any Internet connection.

EchoSign has a scalable pricing model, starting with a free account that lets one user gather up to five signatures per month, through unlimited signature accounts with multiple users, starting at $40 per month.

Besides saving paper, the speed at which your business can execute binding agreements via e-mail should be enough to make you part ways with the old mail and ink system.

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Even if your company has gone digital in a number of paper-centric areas, perhaps the over-arching challenge, especially for small businesses, is archiving your records and files.

Often this data is disparate, spread between e-mails, computer files, and paper records. But if you're diligent about maintaining a searchable, web-based archive of the items listed above, the dividends paid in time and money saved will be enormous in the long-run.

 Depending on the volume of your existing paper records, it may not be cost effective to digitize older files. But if you start fresh by printing to PDF instead of paper going forward, you can create your web-accessible archive with a number of services, including these highly recommended ones:

Additionally, if you're using Google Apps for business, the existing infrastructure of document sharing, collaboration, and large storage capacity makes the system ideal for generating a cloud-based business archive that all of your team members can actively use and update.

http://mashable.com/2010/05/01/small-business-paperless/