For what purposes and applications is a handout suitable? You will learn this in this step.

Handouts serve as handy summaries that supplement a presentation. They contain the essential information at a glance. In the academic context, they are primarily used for presentations, lectures, and research presentations, but also for workshops, training courses, and further education events.

In their concise form, handouts primarily have an overview character. The overview of the presentation content, compactly prepared visually, provides the audience with orientation during the presentation. As a companion to the presentation, they share similarities with presentation slides, although a handout must be even more reduced to gather the central information on as few as one page. However, this also makes the handout available to the audience beyond the presentation: the most important information is thus readily available as a reference for further research.

In this function, unlike slides, a handout also works independently of the presentation itself as a source of information, similar to a poster. However, there is much less space on a handout than on a poster, so it is not suitable for detailed explanations. Therefore, keep it as concise as possible. At very large events with many participants, a handout may be impractical: many copies would be needed, which would also have to be distributed without the passing around disrupting the presentation for too long. In such cases, digital resources (e.g. sent subsequently or in advance by email) can be more useful.

A well-designed handout complements your presentation, provides the audience with orientation, and preserves the central information beyond the presentation itself. You will learn in this chapter how to design handouts best for these purposes.