Do You Really Need Footnotes and Page Numbers?

I'm a minimalist, so I'm always looking for for what I can remove on a screen, always looking for what's not truly needed to tell or aid a story.

Page numbers and footnotes most often do absolutely nothing to tell your story on screen. 

So, let's just get rid of them. Well, okay maybe you need them sometimes.  

But before we decide when we need them, we really need to be honest with ourselves about how our presentations are being used. There are 3 primary situations:

1. On screen presented deck (speaker support)

2. Printed deck

3. Emailed/personal viewing

1. On screen presented deck (speaker support)

Let's assume we are presenting on screen for an audience of 25. You do not need page numbers. (Except maybe for the writing and editing process, in which case you should delete them prior to presenting.)

How about footnotes? Nope, don't need them either. "But what about my legal team's insistence?" Well, you can't read 8pt text in 99% of presentation situations, which means you're not actually using footnotes. You're just adding graphic junk to your screen. (Assure your legal team that you will provide citations in your distributed material.) 

2. Printed Deck

First, are you sure this shouldn't be a Word Document...? Do you have paragraphs and paragraphs of text and little imagery... Still has to be PowerPoint...? Legal is still insistant?

Solution? USE ENDNOTES. Remember those from college?

3. Emailed/Personal Viewing

In effect, a deck that is meant to be viewed by one person on their own screen is nearly identical to the needs of a printed deck. And you never know if the person is simply going to print it out for easier reading anyway. See above.

The Multipurpose Deck

In an ideal world, a presentation should fall only into one of the above categories. But too often, we want our decks to serve all three purposes. Understand that this is like designing a magazine ad and then using the exact same ad as a billboard...and as a web banner ad...and as a subway ad...It's no shame to not have the resources to create different decks for different purposes (although if you were designing an ad campaign, you'd make the effort, right?)

So, if you must have a multipurpose deck, and in its printed form, you need your page numbers and your footnotes (you're sure you can't use endnotes...?), here's a PowerPoint technique for having these things be invisible on the screen, but visible when printed:

The "With Previous Disappear" Animation

For page numbers, you'll need to go into your master page(s) and select the page number text field. Bring up your custom animation panel and apply a "disappear" exit animation and set it to animate "with previous." 

What you have just done is tell PowerPoint to immediately animate out the page number on every page as soon as you advance to the slide in slideshow mode. Regardless of the type of slide transitions you apply (and you're just using "fades," right...?), you will never even see a glimpse of the page number as long as you're in slideshow mode. Of course, the page number still appears in layout mode and thus will always print.

Similarly, for footnotes, you can apply this same type of animation on each individual slide. Or, if you're using PPT 2007, you can set up a custom placeholder text box in a master for footnotes and apply the animation in the master.

I should point out that if for any reason you have to move backward in your slideshow to a previous slide, you may be surprised to see your "invisible" page numbers or footnotes start appearing just before moving back to the previous slide. This is because PowerPoint is reversing the animations, and there's no real way around it.

Also, this technique unfortunately does not work in Keynote as you will see a flash of the page number each time you arrive on the slide.