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Is there a good way to export the speaker notes out of a presentation in Google Slides and keep the formatting?

The things I tried are

  • Printing—this works fine only if the notes are short. Longer text is being cut off.
  • Export to TXT—this exports all text, but I'm losing formatting.
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6 Answers 6

Reset to default
6

I just needed the speaker notes without the main slide content. A persistent web search later and I was pointed to this CreatorStudio add-on which provides exactly that (thanks to this article).

screenshot showing CreatorStudio speaker notes function in action

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1
  • Thanks, after doing this one needs to replace all the slide # s, but it's still way better than copying them all by hand.
    – Banana
    Dec 21, 2021 at 20:59
5

From what I can tell, there's not a great way to do this. But here's a decent method for getting there:

  1. File
  2. Print settings and preview
  3. 1 slide with notes
  4. Download as PDF
  5. Open PDF
  6. Highlight all text
  7. Copy
  8. Paste into text editor

If your deck has text in the slides, you'll have to delete those in the pasted text.

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  • A simpler way to do the same thing is to just download a .txt file (although that has the same issues with text inside the slides).
    – machineghost
    Oct 7, 2018 at 17:41
3

I recently tried to export my Google Presentation as a PowerPoint file and after that opening it with Keynote (since I am a Mac user). All the speaker's notes were captured appropriately without much loss of detail. But when opened with PowerPoint on my Mac the formatting all changed.

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3

This is the recommended method, adapted from this thread:

  • Open your Slides file
  • Click File, then Print settings and preview
  • Click One slide with notes and choose how you would like to print.

I don't have notes that are terribly long, so I don't know if they are cut off if the notes exceed a single page.

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  • 1
    @SightSpirit your edit is fine; though, the google-slides UI literally says (for me) "1 slide without notes", and this is what you should click on, in order to change the setting to become "1 slide with notes" (or whatever you want), just like the link you added says. I agree my wording could've been a little better, and possibly the default is different, based on the presentation/user.
    – michael
    Apr 16, 2017 at 2:48
0

Download as PowerPoint.

Unzip the PowerPoint file.

Scrape the files in ./ppt/notesSlides/ with python beautifulsoup.

Something like:

import os
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

# adjust range as needed
for i in range(0, 102):
    if os.path.isfile('ppt/notesSlides/notesSlide' + str(i) + ".xml"):
        with open('ppt/notesSlides/notesSlide' + str(i) + '.xml', 'r') as file:
            content = file.read().replace('\n', '')
            soup = BeautifulSoup(content, 'html.parser')
            parts = soup.find_all("a:t")
            for p in parts:
                print(p.text, "\n")

You can play with your notes and "Paste without formatting" to get them into markdown.

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0

File → Download → Plain Text

You'll have to format it from there.

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