Printing handouts

To create a generic handout page that contains a minified view of your slideshow, simply head to ‘File > Print’, and under the General tab, you should see a myriad of options. Under the Print section, there’ll be a drop-down menu next to Document, and you should change this from Slides to Handouts. The previewer should change to reflect your choice and you can customise your selection by defining how many slides display per page. Setting it to three slides will usually provide a lined text area next to each one for your audience to take notes. You can also change the order the slides appear in, to better suit your requirements too.

However, this may not provide enough information for you. Many people provide supplementary information in the slide notes and also issue these as handouts for their attendees. Fortunately, Impress supports outputting slides with those notes.

Those of you familiar with commercial alternatives may be wondering where you define your slide notes in the first place, because there’s no big white text box just below the slides you’re editing to type them into. The place to do this in LibreOffice Impress would be via ‘View > Notes’, and here, you should see A4-sized pages containing both the slides you’ve been editing and a space for you to add text content. Once you’re satisfied with the notes you have included, simply head to ‘File > Print’ again and, this time, set the Document drop-down to Notes instead.