Sunbelt Blog

Legal PowerPoint Presentations: How to Create Handouts

PowerPoint presentations are extremely popular in the corporate world as well as in the legal community. Being able to create graphic slideshows complete with text, audio, and video directly on your personal computer or laptop puts the power of presentation into the hands of computer users like you. Whether you’re creating your own PowerPoint presentation for use in a case or have contracted with a litigation support service to create the presentation on your behalf, generating handouts to distribute to other parties involved in the case is easy and worthwhile.

Why Create PowerPoint Handouts?
You’ve put hours into creating the presentation’s content and within minutes, the presentation is over. All of your hard work may have made an impact during the presentation, but as soon as the presentation is over, the memories begin to fade. All those beautiful slides filled with compelling facts and figures? They’re starting to fade away, turning into distant memories. By creating handouts and distributing them to the participants involved in the case, you can ensure that everyone has ready access to the information that you have compiled.

Distribute the handouts before the presentation and your viewers will be less likely to be distracted by taking notes. After all, all of the pertinent details will be provided. After the presentation, participants will be able to refer back to the information. Not only is this convenient, reviewing the presentation’s handouts reinforces the data presented.

Handout Formats
When you create a PowerPoint handout, each slide can potentially be printed as part of the handout. PowerPoint allows you to specify how many slides to print per page such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 slides per page. Three slides per page is the best choice if you want legible slides as well as an area beside each slide for the participants to jot down their personal notes.

How to Create Handouts in PowerPoint 2007
If you created your own PowerPoint presentation and are familiar with the PowerPoint product, you may already know how to do this. However, if a litigation support service provided you with the presentation, you may need to start from scratch.

First, you’ll need to make sure that your presentation file is in editable form. That is, when you open the file, it opens in PowerPoint where you can edit the text and other settings. If the file automatically goes into presentation mode, you’ll need to change the file’s extension from .pps (or .ppsx if you have PowerPoint 2007 or above) to .ppt (or .pptx).

Once open in PowerPoint, click on the View tab and click Handout Master. A blank page with empty squares appears. In the upper and lower portions of the page, you can enter header and footer information. Enter your law firm’s name, case information, date, and other pertinent information into the header and footer sections and then click the red X button to close this view.

Now that your handout master has been customized with your firm and case details, click the Office button in the upper left corner of the screen. Choose Print > Print Preview to enter the Print Preview screen. In the Page Setup section, you should see a textbox labeled “Print What.” Click the dropdown box and choose “Handouts (X slides per page)” and you’ll then see your handouts in the Print Preview screen. If the layout is to your satisfaction, your handouts are ready to print.

Printing and distributing handouts ensures that all parties have access to the details of your presentation before, during, and after the slideshow. This allows participants to pay more attention during the presentation while also reinforcing the information as participants review it later. If your litigation support services team hasn’t provided printouts for you, you can easily create your own.