Notes pages are odd-sized

Problem

PowerPoint has a bug, or several related bugs, that can cause problems with notes pages. For example:

Your presentation is set to a standard PowerPoint page setup size. Normally your notes pages will be the same size, but sometimes one or more notes pages will become some odd size.
And there's no obvious way to change it back. See Solution A below.

Or

Notes text, slide images and graphics on notes pages suddenly appear in the wrong place and/or incorrectly sized. See Solution B below.

Nobody can explain why either of these happens; the second problem seems to be connected to editing presentations in the web or online versions of PowerPoint.

Solution A

By the way, you can also use the same techniques to deliberately modify the size of your notes pages. As always, work on a COPY of your important presentation.

This will involve unzipping the contents of the PPTX file and editing the XML code within. You'll find the basic steps below but if you'd like a more detailed, illustrated XML editing tutorial, or if you use a Mac, visit John Korchok's XML Hacking, An Introduction and then move on to his XML Hacking, Notes Page Repair.

For PowerPoint 2007 or later

• Save your presentation and close PowerPoint.
• Rename your presentation file by adding a .ZIP extension to the end of the filename (make sure that you have Windows Explorer set to display file extensions or this won't work).
• Open the (now) ZIP file, locate and extract the file presentation.xml
  NOTE: this will be far simpler if you use 7Zip (you can download it for free at https://www.7-zip.org/)
• Open presentation.xml in a text editor. Notepad is clumsy at editing XML but it'll work. Don't use Word, WordPad or any other word processing program though.
• Search for this text:

  notesSz cx="6858000" cy="9144000"

  This is where PowerPoint stores the notes page size.
• The cx value is the notes page width, the cy value is the notes page height; units are 914400 to the inch. Change them as needed and save the file.
• Drop the edited presentation.xml back into the open ZIP file, close the ZIP and rename it to remove the ZIP extension.
• You can now open the file, complete with resized notes pages, in PowerPoint.

The cx and cy values are in English Metric Units (EMU). 914400 to the inch or 360000 to the cm. Why the strange measurement system? The large numbers mean that we can express even very small measurements with great precision and still use whole numbers. The units chosen will convert between inches, cm and points and still give whole number results, and are also evenly divisible by 96 and 120, two common screen resolutions on Windows systems. Thanks to PowerPoint MVP John Wilson for the EMU info.

If you have PowerPoint 2000, 2002 or 2003

If you have Microsoft Script Editor installed

• Open the problem presentation.
• Choose Tools, Macro, Microsoft Script Editor (if it's not there, you'll have to re-run Setup to install it, but before you do that, read the other option below).
• In the script editor, use the Project Explorer window to select pres.xml
• In the first few lines of code, you'll see: "
• Delete both "notessizex" and "notessizey" entries (and nothing else).
• Choose File, Exit. When asked, let it update the files.

Your notes pages will now be reset to their default size.

If you don't have Script Editor installed:

• Open the presentation
• Choose File, Save As Web Page. Make sure it's set to HTML rather than Single File/MHT. Give it a name and save it to any convenient folder. This creates a [name].htm file and a [name]_files folder (where [name] represents the name you gave the file when you saved it)
• In the [name]_files folder you'll find a file called pres.xml
• Open pres.xml in Notepad
• In the first few lines of text, find and delete the text that reads: notessizex="4068" notessizey="6048" (the numbers may be different)
• Save the file
• Switch back to PowerPoint, where you'll notice that the current presentation is now named [name].htm.
• Close the presentation then choose File, 1 (open the first file on the MRU list) to reopen [name].htm
• The notes page will now be normal sized.

Solution B

To restore notes page, do the following:

• View | Notes Master | Slide Size - change the notes page size to the size you want
• View | Notes Master | Placeholders - uncheck all checkboxes from the placeholder part of the ribbon then REcheck all the checkboxes.

That should reset the notes page size and put the placeholders in the correct location.

If the placeholders are still not correct on each notes page, do the following on each notes page:

• Right-click on the notes page to bring up the context menu
• Select Notes Layout and uncheck all checkboxes then click OK to close the dialog
• Select Notes Layout and REcheck all checkboxes then click OK to close the dialog

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