How to print 3 PowerPoint slides with notes on one sheet

Quite popular problem with power point is to print multiple slides one sheet of paper, and when you want print them with notes then you have only one option - one slide per sheet.

In this post I show you the trick and prepare documents with 3 slides on one sheet with notes and without exporting it to word! To do this you will need the virtual PDF printer (I am using the Bullzip PDF Printer here) and Acrobat Reader.

UPDATE: Now I would recommend doPDF as the virtual printer software. It has not only more features but you are able to define custom paper size in its Advanced settings. There is no need to perform the first step described here.  

Let's start. I am using PP 2010 so in other version it may look differently. First what we need to do is to define new printing page size. To do so go: 

Control Panel ->  Device and Printers  

now click any of your printer. After this you will see the Print server properties at the top of the window. Click it, then select A4 page check the Create a new form and name the new form Half A4. In boxes Width and Height set 3.94in 8.15in. You should see on your screen something like this:

Click OK. And open your presentation. The first thing what you need to do is set your new printing page. Open the File -> Print ->  Print Properties. Now you need to set your page page size to Half A4. It depends on what printer you use. In my case this is virtual printer Bullzip PDF Printer and my settings looks like this:

OK, now you see on the print preview that your page doesn't look good. Especially when you select the Notes Pages. To correct the layout open View -> Notes Master: 

   

Fix the layout look like this below:

Close the view, add you notes to your slides. And we may start printing. The first step is to print to PDF, that is why I use the virtual printer. Just print your slides with notes to PDF one per sheet. When you open your this PDF in Acrobat Reader you should see your slides with notes each printed on wide envelope sheet: 

And the last step is printing this 3 pages on one A4 sheet. Open Adobe Reader's printing panel and set Page Scaling to Multiple Pages per sheet, then set Pages per sheet to Custom 1 by 3. 

And you can print your document. Three slides with notes on one sheet of paper.