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Restoring Notes Pages in PowerPoint
- Written by: Jamie Garroch
- Categories: PowerPoint design
- Comments: 2

Believe it or not, sometimes things go wonky in the world of PowerPoint (gasp!). One particularly frustrating quirk we come across is when the Notes Pages layout gets out of sync. Sometimes the slide, notes and number placeholders change size or move from where you’ve told them to be in the Notes Master. So, we’ve developed a little VBA macro which fixes it for you in a snap.
Learn how to use the Notes Master to print PowerPoint with notes and check out our PowerPoint automation service.
The Notes Master is on the left in the screenshot below. This defines where the three placeholders (slide, notes, slide number) are positioned and what size they should be. However, on the right you can see the Notes Page for one of our slides – it’s not following the master.
Though it’s frustrating, it’s pretty simple to correct. All you need to do is open the Notes Page for your slide by clicking the View tab in PowerPoint followed by Notes View. Once in this view you can right–click on the Notes Page and choose Notes Layout:
This gives you the option to Reapply master, for the current slide:
And hey presto, all fixed:
But did you spot the gargantuan problem??
It resets the CURRENT slide only! Oh dear. Cue hours of tedious work for those huge presentation projects with tens if not hundreds of slides.
Don’t worry, you can wave RSI goodbye because Captain VBA is here to save the day.
If you’ve never used VBA before, check out our getting started article. If you have used VBA in PowerPoint and you know how to throw some VBA at your presentation, here’s our handy macro for fixing wonky Notes Pages:
Just copy paste the VBA below into a code module and run it from PowerPoint by pressing Alt+F8 and double clicking the macro.
Sub RestoreNotesPages() Dim oSld As Slide Dim oShp As Shape Dim lIdx As Long On Error Resume Next With ActivePresentation For Each oSld In .Slides With oSld.NotesPage.Shapes ' Delete the objects from the notes page in reverse order For lIdx = .Count To 1 Step -1 ' Make a copy of any existing notes pane text If .Item(lIdx).PlaceholderFormat.Type = ppPlaceholderBody Then If .Item(lIdx).TextFrame.HasText Then .Item(lIdx).TextFrame2.TextRange.Copy .Item(lIdx).Delete ' Delete the text End If End If .Item(lIdx).Delete ' Delete the placeholder Next DoEvents ' Recreate the placeholder objects on the notes page .AddPlaceholder ppPlaceholderTitle .AddPlaceholder(ppPlaceholderBody).TextFrame2.TextRange.Paste .AddPlaceholder ppPlaceholderSlideNumber End With Next End With End Sub
So, there you have it! A big automation time saver that lets you get on with far more interesting presentation tasks than the monotony of manually resetting your notes pages, one slide at a time.
What other tasks you ask? Well, why not add sensational slide transitions or a sleek mobile phone media holder to your next deck? For more PowerPoint design ideas, check out the rest of our blog.
Got something extra you’d like PowerPoint to do?
Check out our PowerPoint automation service which provides you with a custom solution to your specific needs.
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Greg Tufnall Siemens

Hello,
Thank you for the post!
When I run the VBA the notes master is applied everywhere which is awesome, but all the notes that are there disappear. Am I doing something wrong? Would you be able to double-check the code?
Thanks!
Erica
Thanks for trying this VBA code out Erica. The original code was designed to restore the notes pages before any notes text had been created and we’ve updated it to deal with the use case you’ve described. Thanks for making it better!