Working with Speaker Notes

This page tells you how to read and edit speaker notes using the Slides API.

Notes pages and notes masters

A notes page is a kind of page used for generating handouts for slides in a presentation. Each slide has one notes page. The text of a slide's speaker notes are contained the first BODY placeholder shape on a slide's notes page. Only the text content of this notes shape is editable in the Slides API. Its other properties and the rest of the notes page contents are read-only.

The presentation's notes master is a page that defines the default elements and text styles used on notes pages. A presentation only has one notes master. Notes masters are read-only in the Slides API.

Reading and writing speaker notes

To find a slide's speaker note shape, find the slide's notes Page in its SlideProperties message. The shape containing the speaker notes text is identified by the speakerNotesObjectId field in the notes page's NotesProperties message.

To read a slide's speaker notes, find an object with this ID on the notes page and read its text. In rare cases, this object will not exist, which means the slides have no speaker notes.

You can use the text batchUpdate requests to modify the text inside the speaker notes shape. In the rare case where the speaker notes shape does not exist, the Slides API creates it automatically when it sees a valid text operation using a speakerNotesObjectId.