Quickly Prepare a Black-and-White Presentation

Topic at a glance

Black-and-white overheads and good old paper are still the presentation media of choice for many people. But perhaps your presentation must do double duty by being great black-and-white overheads while still looking good in color later. You can use black-and-white view to help optimize your presentation so that it works well both ways.

Guidelines for Using Color Presentations in Black and White

      Black and White button

  Use the Black and White button to see a color presentation in black and white.

  Control how individual items on slides look when printed. In black-and-white view, select an object, right-click, and then click Black and White on the shortcut menu. Select an option to modify the way the selected item prints in black and white without permanently changing it.

Other views in black and white   You can also use the Black and White button while in notes page view or slide sorter view to see how your slides will look when printed. Print in pure black and white   The dialog box for the Print command (File menu) contains the Pure black and white option, which converts all grays to black or white for printing. Change the color scheme   Use Slide Color Scheme (Format menu) to change to a different color scheme, change to a black-and-white scheme, or modify colors within a color scheme if you want to make more lasting adjustments to your presentation. Print button Click the Print button   If you click the Print button while in black-and-white view, PowerPoint prints the presentation as it appears on the screen in black-and-white view.

The Slide Miniature Window

The Slide Miniature window appears automatically when you’re in black-and-white view. If the Slide Miniature window is not visible, click Slide Miniature (View menu) to display it. When you’re working in black-and-white view, the Slide Miniature window displays a thumbnail image of the slide in color. When you switch out of black-and-white view, the Slide Miniature window displays the slide in black and white.

Office Assistant button

Want to know more?   Look up Getting Results - Black and White in Help.