Understanding Presentations – Presentation Views

Understand the uses of different presentation view modes: normal view, outline view, handout view, notes view, slide sorter view.

Impress offers us different views to work on our slides and presentations. These views can be used to understand the slide structures in a presentation in different ways.

The main view in which we create individual slides is known as ‘Normal View’. This view is used to design and format slides, add effects, text or graphics to slides.


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Normal View 1To add a new slide in the Normal View, click on ‘Insert’ from the main menu bar and select ‘Slide’ or ‘Duplicate Slide’ as per the requirement from the drop down which gets displayed on clicking the ‘Insert’ button. Below is the illustration of how to add a new slide in the normal view.
Slide 2
In ‘Outline View’, all the slides of the presentation are displayed in a numbered sequence.
‘Outline View’ shows all the topics, titles, bulleted lists and numbered lists for each slide in an outline format.

Outline 3In ‘Outline View’ only the text in the default text box of the slide is shown. If we add text boxes or graphics in slides then it will not be shown in the outline view.

‘Notes View’ is used to add notes pertaining to a particular slide. These notes are not visible when the presentation is shown to audience or some extra display monitor connected to your machine.

To create notes in the ‘Notes View’, we click on the ‘Notes’ view tab and select the slide from slide pane. A text box appears below the slide where we can add notes.

Notes 4The notes text box can also be resized by using the resizing handles which appear when we click on the border of the text box. The text box can also be moved by clicking on the edge of the box and then moving the cursor to the desired location.

Resize Notes 5‘Handout View’ can be used to set up the layout of the slides of the presentation for creating a hardcopy. We select the layout from the ‘Tasks’ Pane. We can print 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 9 slides per page.

Layout 6All the slide thumbnails are contained in the ‘Slide Sorter’ view. We can work with groups of slides in this view.

Slide Sorter 7