By Bill Foley, Microsoft MVP and owner of the PPT Inc web site.

This article introduces add-ins and resources that can make your printing life easier.

Printing Add-ins

These add-ins created by PowerPoint MVPs extend and enhance printing functionality in PowerPoint, so that you can create handouts in presentation format, print the current slide from Slide Show view, and preserve linking and interactivity in presentations after you convert them to PDF. Follow the links to download free trial versions.

Handout Wizard   From Shyam Pillai (fellow PowerPoint MVP). The Handout Wizard is used to create handouts of PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint does support handouts, but these are limited in layouts and they can only be printed. You cannot format a handout to be printed beyond manipulating few shapes on the handout master of PowerPoint.

The Handout Wizard add-in does away with all such limitations. It creates handouts in presentation format. You can edit the output file. You can customize it exactly to your requirement. Better yet, it offers layout definition templates, so you can create your own unique layouts!

Print the current slide in a show   Sometimes you might have a need to provide the user with the ability to print the current slide while in Slide Show mode. Print current slide from Slide Show view from Shyam Pillai provides VBA code to do just that.

Capture Show Add-In   PowerPoint 2002 did away with the ability to print slides with the animations. Capture Show Add-in is a replacement for that functionality and more. The add-in captures slide builds as you present. You can capture builds into slides of a presentation or as images into a specified folder.

Printing Resources

The following free web resources can assist you in answering questions about printing in PowerPoint, or about troubleshooting specific PowerPoint problems.

• First and foremost, we MUST include The PowerPoint FAQ, created by our own PowerPoint MVP - Steve Rindsberg. It is a veritable plethora of information on PowerPoint and the first place to start your research when learning PowerPoint.
• PowerPoint Handouts from Indezine by Geetesh Bajaj (PowerPoint 2003)
• As always, anytime you have a question regarding the use of PowerPoint, feel free to stop by the PowerPoint 2003 Newsgroups and post your question.

About the author:   Bill Foley is the Vice President and co-owner of Professional Training Technologies, Inc. He was recently nominated as a PowerPoint MVP and just completed the examination requirements to be certified as a Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor. His specialties include creating Computer-Based Training (CBT) using PowerPoint VBA, developing Word templates and user-interfaces for accessing your various templates, providing computer training on Microsoft office products, developing training materials for the Nuclear Power industry, training Operators at nuclear power plants, providing Continuing Instructor Training, and maintaining the PPT Inc web site.