When working with unfamiliar software, I am often frustrated by the difficulty of performing the simplest tasks.
For example, one of my clients recently had a problem with a Powerpoint presentation where she was using the software to produce both slides and handouts based on those slides.
In essence, she had some additional printed material and wanted to adjust the Powerpoint page numbering so that these extra pages could be included at the beginning of the handouts.
Surprisingly, Powerpoint offers no way to adjust the starting number of the printed pages even though you can do this with the slides—because there is the option to include several slides on the printed page, the slide numbering is necessarily independent of the page numbering.
One obvious, if messy, solution is to force the page numbering by creating a number of 'dummy' slides which would be removed from the presentation after printing.
The slight problem with this approach is that any attempt to print from (say) page 5 actually results in that page being renumbered as page 1—any change in a single page would also involve printing out the lot to get the numbering right.
A quick search of the internet reveals that many people are taxed by this problem and the Microsoft web site offers the following helpful advice:
SYMPTOMS
When you print handout pages in Microsoft PowerPoint, and you select a range of slides to print (for example, slides 11-20), PowerPoint starts numbering the handout pages from 1, instead of starting at the first handout page in the slide range.
CAUSE
Page numbering is a built-in feature in PowerPoint that cannot be changed
Fortunately, this 'feature' does not occur in other supposedly-compatible Microsoft Office software so the simplest solution offered by Microsoft is to 'export' (send to) the Powerpoint file to Word where you can both adjust the starting page number and print any selected pages without disrupting the numbering.
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