Presentations · Glossary
What are speaker notes?
Speaker notes are the text you write for yourself against a slide: what to say, the number you must not misquote, the question to expect. They are stored with the slide and never rendered on it, so the room sees the slide and you see the note, usually in a separate window on your own screen.
Notes are the difference between reading your slides aloud and presenting them. They are also the part people forget travels with the file.
Nuwan Madhusanka · Co-founder
3 min read · Published
Where they live and where they appear
Notes are attached per slide and edited in a pane in the builder, collapsed by default so they stay out of the way while you are designing. In presenting mode they can be popped out into a second browser window titled Speaker notes, carrying the note plus the slide number and total, which you drag to your own screen while the audience sees the deck on the other. They never appear on the slide itself, in any mode.
They do not travel with the exports
Nothing in the export path reads the notes. The PDF does not carry them, and neither PowerPoint export does either. That is worth knowing before you send a deck and assume the recipient can see the caveat you wrote against slide seven. If the notes matter to somebody else, they have to be sent as their own document.
A share link exposes them
There is an open issue worth planning around: the notes toggle in presenting mode is not disabled for a shared link, and the share endpoint returns the slides with their notes attached. Anyone you send a share link to can bring up your notes. Until that is fixed, treat notes on a shared deck as visible, and keep anything genuinely private out of them.
Questions people ask
Can the audience see my notes?
Not on the slide, and not in the window on the projector. They can see them if you send a share link, because the notes toggle is not disabled there and the share data includes them. On a screen you are presenting yourself, the notes stay on your own display.
Do notes export to PowerPoint?
No. Neither the image nor the editable PowerPoint export carries them, and nor does the PDF. If a colleague is presenting your deck, send the notes separately or paste them into a document, because opening the file will not give them to anybody.
Can I format notes?
Yes, as rich text: bold, italic, underline, bullets and numbered lists. That is enough to mark the sentence you must not forget and to list the two questions you expect. Keep them short, since a note longer than the screen is a note you will not read while presenting.
How do I show notes on a second screen?
Pop them out into their own window and drag that window to your own display, leaving the deck full screen on the projector. It is a browser window rather than a special presenter mode, which means it works with whatever screen arrangement your machine already has.
Should I write notes as full sentences?
Write the opening line in full, because that is the one you fumble, then keep the rest as prompts. Full paragraphs get read aloud, and reading aloud is the one thing notes are meant to prevent.
Make one with presentations
The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match your own.
Create a presentation with OneCraftRelated questions
- Editable PPTX against image PPTXAn image PPTX is one picture per slide. An editable PPTX rebuilds text, tables and charts as real PowerPoint objects you can edit after export.
- What are slide roles?A slide role is the job a slide does: cover, agenda, metrics, comparison, timeline. Twenty six of them, each with its own fields and layouts.
- How many slides in a pitch deck?Ten to fifteen for a first meeting, and the count matters less than which slides. What has to be there, what belongs in an appendix, and why.
Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .