How to Print PowerPoint and Google Slides With Speaker Notes

Quick answer: in PowerPoint, go to File > Print, open the layout dropdown that says "Full Page Slides", and choose Notes Pages — that is the one layout that prints the slide with your speaker notes underneath it. In Google Slides, go to File > Print settings and preview, then choose 1 slide with notes from the layout dropdown and click Print. Almost everyone who gets stuck on this is stuck for the same reason: they are looking in the Handouts section, and Handouts never include notes.

This is one of those tasks that feels like it should take five seconds and instead eats fifteen minutes before a meeting. The controls are buried, the terminology is misleading, and the two apps use completely different words for the same idea. Here is the whole thing, for every version, plus how to do it without burning through half a cartridge.

First, the vocabulary — this is where most people go wrong

PowerPoint offers several print layouts, and only one of them contains your notes. Learn these four names and the problem mostly disappears:

Layout	What you get	Includes speaker notes?
Full Page Slides	One slide filling each sheet	No
Notes Pages	The slide in the top half, your notes printed underneath	Yes
Outline	Text-only outline of slide titles and bullets	No
Handouts (1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 9 per page)	Thumbnails for the audience. The 3-per-page option adds blank ruled lines	No — the lines are for the audience to write on

The 3-slides-per-page handout is the specific trap. It looks like it has notes next to each slide, but those lines are empty by design. If you want your notes on paper, you want Notes Pages.

PowerPoint on Windows

1. Open the presentation and go to File > Print.
2. Under Settings, click the second dropdown — it says Full Page Slides by default.
3. Under the Print Layout heading at the top of that menu, choose Notes Pages.
4. Check the preview on the right. You should see the slide at the top of the sheet and your notes text below it. If the notes area is blank, that slide genuinely has no notes on it.
5. Optional but worth it: tick Frame Slides at the bottom of the same dropdown if you are printing on white backgrounds and want a visible border.
6. Click Print.

Microsoft's own reference for this is the Print your PowerPoint slides, handouts, or notes page, which also covers the notes master if you want to change how the notes page is laid out.

If the notes text is too small to read

Notes Pages uses a fixed 12-point layout that shrinks when a slide has a lot of notes. To fix it properly, go to View > Notes Master, select the notes placeholder, and increase the font size there. That changes every notes page at once rather than slide by slide. You can also shrink the slide image on the notes master to give the text more room — useful when your notes run long and the slide itself is just a title.

PowerPoint on Mac

1. File > Print.
2. Click Show Details if the dialog is collapsed.
3. Find the Layout dropdown (in some versions it is labelled Print What) and choose Notes.
4. Confirm in the preview pane, then print.

On Mac the notes master lives at View > Notes Master as well, and behaves the same way.

PowerPoint for the web

The browser version is the one real limitation. PowerPoint for the web can print slides, but it does not offer the Notes Pages layout. You have two options:

• Download and print locally. File > Save As > Download a Copy, open it in desktop PowerPoint, then follow the Windows or Mac steps above.
• Export to PDF from the desktop app or from a Mac. Choose Notes Pages first, then print to PDF instead of paper. You get a file you can email, read on a tablet, or print later without redoing the setup.

Google Slides: slides with notes

1. Open the presentation and choose File > Print settings and preview. (Not File > Print — that shortcut skips the layout options entirely, which is why so many people never find this.)
2. A preview bar appears across the top. Open the layout dropdown — it usually reads 1 slide without notes.
3. Choose 1 slide with notes.
4. Click Print, and the browser's print dialog opens with the notes layout already applied.

In the same preview bar you will find two more useful toggles: Hide background, which strips out dark or photographic slide backgrounds, and Include skipped slides. Hide background is the single biggest ink saver in this whole guide — more on that below. Google's general reference is the Print a file help page for Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Printing the speaker notes on their own, without the slides

Google Slides has no built-in "notes only" layout. The reliable workaround takes about twenty seconds:

1. File > Download > Plain text (.txt) — this exports the slide text but not the notes, so it is not the answer on its own.
2. Better: File > Print settings and preview > 1 slide with notes, then in the browser print dialog choose Save as PDF rather than a printer. You now have a searchable PDF of slides plus notes that you can read from a phone or tablet during the talk and never print at all.
3. If you truly need notes text alone, open the speaker notes pane at the bottom of the editor, select and copy the notes into a Google Doc, then print that. It sounds crude, but it produces the tightest, most readable page and uses a fraction of the ink.

Print to PDF first — nearly always the right move

Before you send twenty notes pages to the printer, print to PDF and look at it. It costs nothing and it catches the three problems that otherwise waste a whole stack of paper: notes truncated at the bottom of the page, slides with no notes producing near-empty sheets, and dark slide backgrounds that will drink ink.

On Windows choose Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. On Mac use the PDF > Save as PDF button in the print dialog. In Chrome, choose Save as PDF as the destination.

How to print notes pages without wasting ink

Notes pages are the most ink-hungry thing most people print, because every sheet carries a full-colour slide image. A few settings turn a genuinely expensive print job into a cheap one:

• Hide background (Google Slides) or apply a light theme before printing (PowerPoint). A dark or photographic background on 30 slides can consume more ink than everything else you print that month.
• Print in grayscale. In PowerPoint, the print dialog has a Color dropdown at the bottom with Grayscale and Pure Black and White options. Pure Black and White drops shadows and fills entirely — for text-heavy notes it is often more readable, not less.
• Use draft or economy quality. For notes you will read once and throw away, draft mode is fine and can use meaningfully less ink per page.
• Print double-sided. Halves the paper immediately. Our guide to duplex printing on Windows, Mac and Chromebook covers how to do it on printers without an automatic duplexer too.
• Skip slides with no notes. There is no toggle for this, so use the page range box to print only the slides you actually annotated.

If you want to know what a presentation deck actually costs you to print, our printer ink cost calculator puts a number on it per page — and the answer usually surprises people who print colour slides regularly.

Paper: use plain, not photo

Notes pages are working documents. Standard 20 lb multipurpose paper is right for them; photo or presentation paper is a waste and can smear where the notes text meets a heavy slide image. If you are printing handouts for an audience rather than notes for yourself, stepping up to 24 lb or 28 lb paper stops the slide image showing through from the other side — the ghosting effect that makes double-sided handouts look cheap. Our paper weight, brightness and finish guide explains what actually changes between those weights, and how to store paper so it does not curl and jam a big print run halfway through.

Common problems and what causes them

Problem	Cause	Fix
Notes are cut off at the bottom of the page	Too much text for the fixed notes placeholder	View > Notes Master, shrink the slide image or reduce the notes font, or split the notes across two slides
Notes print far too small	Default 12 pt scaled down to fit	Increase the font on the notes master, not on individual slides
Google Slides prints slides without notes even after choosing the layout	Used File > Print instead of Print settings and preview	Always go through Print settings and preview
Every second page is blank	Duplex is on and the notes layout already has a page break	Turn duplex off for this job, or use the page range box
Notes pages come out with heavy dark backgrounds	Slide theme is dark; the print layout keeps it	Tick Hide background (Slides) or switch to a light theme before printing (PowerPoint)
Text prints faint or streaked	Nothing to do with the layout	See faded and streaky prints
Nothing prints at all	Printer, driver or queue	See the complete not-printing checklist

Which layout for which situation

• Speaking from paper — Notes Pages, or 1 slide with notes. One slide per sheet, easy to flip.
• Audience handout, formal — Handouts, 2 or 3 per page, on 24 lb paper.
• Audience handout, cheap and cheerful — Handouts, 6 per page, grayscale, double-sided.
• Rehearsing on a tablet — Notes Pages exported to PDF. No ink at all.
• Reviewing the wording only — Outline view. Fastest and cheapest thing to print in either app.

Whatever you land on, it is worth knowing what a heavy print week costs you. If you print decks often, a printer with a low cost per page changes the maths entirely — our roundup of printers with the cheapest ink covers it, and if you are simply due a refill, the Find Ink by Printer page will match your exact model to the right cartridge.