Making PowerPoint Notes Run Over Two Pages

I was trying to help a colleague print their PowerPoint notes pages, and found that the notes, instead of printing over two pages, as mine do, kept shrinking to fit one notes page.

I got to the point of pdfing the PowerPoint file, but although it looked like it was working perfectly within the PowerPoint itself, and the page count was right as it was being sent to pdf, on opening the pdf file, the result was the original PowerPoint slide count without the extra 'over-flow' text pages that should have appeared.

It was persistently shrinking to fit.

I realised that this must be something to do with the template. So I checked out the Slide Master. I changed the font size, and specified it in the Notes Master. I ticked "Do not Autofit" under Master View | Notes Master | Text Direction | More Options | Autofit.
Grr! I was STILL unable to make the text run over one page in length. All the help posts online for this seem to point to this behaviour being quite "normal", and providing all sorts of peculiar gymnastics in order to create an overflow notes page.

Seeing as I have old PowerPoint slides which do this auto-magically, but I felt there must be a native solution within PowerPoint that would allow this to happen. I had just not yet found the magic bullet.

Until today.

The solution is not found within the Master view, or within the font sizing tools.

Navigate to the slide in your PowerPoint deck whose notes you want to expand.
Go to the view tab.
Click on "notes pages".
Highlight the text in the notes page.
Select the text, and go to the home tab.
Now select the font and size you want to display.
Select the paragraph formatting.
Go to Text Direction | More Options | Autofit and select "Do not Autofit".

Unfortunately, you will have to do this for each page that you want your notes to go over the page on.

But at least now your PowerPoint deck will print out with multiple pages of notes.


Sam