As a speaker, I often find it extremely useful to be able to transfer my PowerPoint presentations with my speaker's notes to Word. This generates a nice neat table which I can edit and is so much easier to work with than PowerPoint's notes view.

This option is available in 2003 (File - Send To - Microsoft Word) and 2007 (Office Button - Publish - Create Handouts in Microsoft Word).

A window pops up that gives you the options of Notes Next To Slides, Blank Lines Next To Slides (similar to the commonly used handouts view), Notes Below Slides (similar to printing notes in PowerPoint), Blank Lines Below Slides, and Outline Only. A little thumbnail image shows you what it will look like.

In addition, you have the option to Paste the slides or Paste Link the slides. Pasting will insert the slides into Word as a PowerPoint Object (which means you can doubleclick on them to edit them in a mini powerpoint window). Paste Link means that if you change the text in PowerPoint, the slides are automatically updated in Word when you next open the file (note the usual cautions of this doesn't apply via email unless you are also mailing the PPT file, etc.). Make your selections and click OK. If you have a very large PowerPoint file, it may take a while to generate the Word document. Be patient.

See the end of this posting for a HUGE tip on how to reduce the size of your final Word document.

Word then opens and creates a table with a column for the slide number, a column with a picture of the slide, a column for notes. Your boss may like having the slide numbers (in which case, using the hint at the end, copy and paste the slides into the same column as the slide numbers all at the same time, then you can delete one column. When it's for myself, I usually delete the slide number column and just number the pages. By doing this, I can then widen out the third column of note text.

Using the Outline Only feature allows you to bring only your PowerPoint text into a Word document. I often use this option to generate take home documents with more details added about what we covered.

You can edit everything in the Word document.

One huge suggestion: If you are "done" with the slides, go through the Word document, cut each slide individually, then click Home Ribbon-Paste-Paste Special and paste it as a picture so that it becomes a picture instead of a PowerPoint object. (I've yet to find a more efficient way to do them all at once - if you know of a way, please let me know!)  If you don't do this, your Word document could be a gazillion megs file (i.e. 30 MB files are not uncommon). When you are done pasting all the slides (this is actually very quick to do), then click on the Format Ribbon after you select a picture, Compress Pictures, Options and select Print/Screen/Email as appropriate for how much you would like to reduce the size of the pictures, then click OK, and OK a second time to apply the compression to all pictures in the document (do not select compress only selected pictures unless you really only want the selected picture to be compressed). These steps will reduce the size of your file dramatically.

Hope you and your boss find this feature helpful. :)