How to Print Your PowerPoint Slides – Things to Keep in Mind

If you’ve ever needed to print your PowerPoint slides, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll take a look at the best practices you need to be aware of whenever you need to print a PowerPoint presentation.

To start off, let’s look at some things you need to keep in mind before you print your PowerPoint slides. Here’s how you can prepare your slides for printing, so that they look decent.

How to Prepare Your PowerPoint Presentations for Printing

When preparing your PowerPoint slides for printing, there are many best practices you need to know to ensure your presentation looks good and is easy to read on paper. Here are some tips that you can follow:

(Also, I know PowerPoint is used for a lot more than just creating slideshows and presentations, so this article is perfect for ANYONE who wants to print something they’ve made on PowerPoint.)

1. Change Background Color to White:

Before you print your PowerPoint slides, it’s usually a good idea to change the color of your slide background to white. Unless of course, a different color is needed. This is usually to prevent excessive use of toner when printed. Also, sometimes colors can look uneven when printed. If these points aren’t an issue for you, you can skip this part. Just make sure that your text remains visible after you print your PowerPoint slides.

2. Simplify the Slides

Next, you can remove non-essential design elements, such as graphics and logos. It’s a good idea to simplify the layout to focus on the content. Remove background shapes and other design elements that might be too distracting in the printed format.

3. Avoid using Large Photos and Elements:

Sure, large, high-quality photos are great for presentations, but they’re not printer-friendly. Use smaller images, or resize existing images before printing.

The same goes for all elements on your slides. Shrink the size of graphics, charts, diagrams, etc. Having more white space on slides improves readability, especially in printed formats.

4. Combine Slides

Lastly, try to save some page by combining slides with low amounts of content. If you have slides that have very little content, try to combine/merge them.  

Now, let’s move on to the actual printing of PowerPoint slides:

How to Print Your PowerPoint Slides

To print your PowerPoint slides, launch PowerPoint, and open the presentation you’d like to print.

Next, go to the File tab in the ribbon, which opens a new menu. On the left sidebar, find and click on Print.

You can now select a print layout. To do this, under Settings, choose a print layout.

If you just want to print all your slides, select Print All Slides.

You also get to choose from different types of prints available, when you click on the next drop down menu:

For most use cases you can select Full Page Slides. But you can also print just the outline or notes as well.

If you just want to print a few slides only, you can specify that as well. Also use the last dropdown menu to choose between color, greyscale, and black and white prints.

Finally, click on the Print button at the top to print your PowerPoint slides.

Conclusion

Well, there you have it. In this article we’ve gone through some best practices to follow when it comes to printing PowerPoint slides, and we’ve also taken a look at how you can print your PowerPoint slides. I hope this article was helpful. In the meantime, if you’re looking for PowerPoint and presentation resources that can improve your presentations, check out our website. Good luck on your presentation!