Creating Teacher / Student editions of presentations
Problem
Sometimes you need to create two different versions of a presentation, one for each of two different audiences. You might have information that you want some groups, teachers, for example, to see and other information that should appear only in the student edition of the presentation.
If you need to do this, PowerPoint doesn't offer much help, short of maintaining two different versions of the same presentation.
Isn't there a better solution?
There is. And it's free.
The PPTools Teacher and Student Editions
Download the free PPTools Teacher and Student Editions add-in.
- Save the file TeacherStudentEditions.zip to any convenient folder.
- Unzip it to extract TeacherStudentEditions.ppa to the same folder.
- Set your macro security settings to medium or lower.
- Go to the Add-ins dialog box and click Add.
- Browse to where you've stored the TeacherStudentEditions.ppa file and select it.
The TeacherStudentEditions add-in adds two commands to the Tools menu: Teacher and Student. See the Add-ins tab if you use PPT 2007 or later.
To designate shapes as "Teacher-only" content, select them, then choose Teacher from the Tools menu. Similarly, choose Student to designate the shapes as content intended only for the Student edition of your presentation.
To hide or view Teacher-only or Student-only content, make sure nothing is selected, then choose Teacher or Student from the Tools menu.
When you click, for example, Teacher with nothing selected the add-in "toggles" visibility for all shapes marked as Teacher-only content. If it was visible, it becomes invisible and vice versa.
This way you can make any of your Teacher-only or Student-only content visible or invisible with a single click, whether it's on slides or notes pages.