Adding Multimedia to Your Presentation
PowerPoint puts you in the director's chair when it comes to adding sounds, clip art (including pictures with movement such as animated GIFs), extended musical accompaniment, and even movie clips. But just because it can be done doesn't necessarily mean it should be done. Multimedia components in a presentation tend to overwhelm the audience. Be sure you really want to draw your audience's attention away from what you're saying before you insert a multimedia clip.
Adding Music, Sounds, and Video Clips
The easiest way to add multimedia to a presentation combines the Slide Layout pane's content placeholder and Office's Clip Gallery:
In Normal view, select the slide on which you want to include a media clip (sound or movie).
In the Slide Layout pane, select one of the Content Layouts, Text and Content Layouts, or one of the Other Layouts that includes the "321" clapboard.
→ To change the layout of the slide, see "Choosing a Slide Layout".
Back in the slide, rearrange the placeholders as necessary to fit both the clip and text (if any) on the slide. (If you don't want text on the slide, make the text placeholder as small as possible and move it to the side.)
Choose the sound or motion clip you want, and then click OK. The Media Gallery inserts the clip you selected into the media clip placeholder on your slide, and then asks: "Do you want your movie (or sound) to play automatically in the slide show? If not, it will play when you click it." Choose Yes if you want the movie/sound to begin as soon as the slide appears. If you choose No, you'll have to click the picture (or the speaker that symbolizes a sound) to play the sound or show the video during the presentation.
Note
You'll find animated GIFs in the Media Gallery. Office XP does not include any tools that allow you to edit an animated GIF; to change one of these images, you must use a program specifically designed to handle this graphic format, such as Magic Viewer from Crayonsoft (http://www.crayonsoft.com/).
Other methods for adding multimedia to a slide include the following:
To place a clip in the drawing layer, choose Insert, Picture, Clip Art (or equivalently, click the Clip Art icon on the Drawing toolbar). This brings up the Insert Clip Art pane—thus giving you the widest latitude in choosing what kind of clip you want to use.
To bypass the Media Gallery and choose a picture from files stored on your computer or network, choose Insert, Picture, From File.
Use Insert, Movies and Sounds if you know what kind of multimedia clip you want to insert: Movie from Media Gallery brings up the Media Gallery with Motion Clips alone available; Sound from Media Gallery does the same, with Sounds.
Also use Insert, Movies and Sounds if you want to play a CD track, or if you want to record a custom sound to go with the slide.
→ For more information on sounds, see "Using CD Audio and Recorded Audio".
All the preceding methods insert a multimedia clip into your presentation for playback by PowerPoint itself. For maximum control over media objects, embed a Windows Media Player object on a slide. The following guidelines can help you decide when you should use this option:
Do you want anyone viewing the presentation to be able to start, stop, and jump through the media clip? PowerPoint includes only basic controls for starting, ending, and looping. Media Player includes extensive capabilities for fast forward, marking and jumping to segments, editing, and the like. A Media Player Object can even display a working "Play/Stop" slider on the slide.
Some versions of Media Player on machines running Windows 95 were unstable and rendered clips with poor fidelity. On such a system, clips that perform well with PowerPoint alone might appear grainy or streaked with Media Player.
You cannot adjust the PowerPoint animation multimedia effects of a Media Player object (see next section).
If you test a presentation with one version of Media Player and then run it on a machine that uses a different version of Media Player, you might notice significant differences.
To embed a Windows Media Player object in a slide, choose Insert, Object, and then choose Media Clip, MIDI Sequence, Video Clip, or Wave Sound. Any of those choices will embed an object that plays back with the Windows Media Player.
Controlling a Video or Sound Clip
To change the behavior of a video or sound clip after you place it on a slide—whether it's in a placeholder, or in the drawing layer—right-click the clip (or the bullhorn icon representing a sound) and choose Custom Animation. Click the Multimedia Settings tab to see options that apply only to sounds and media clips.
Use these options to create a video introduction to a slide with bullet points. The slide should appear first, with the title and background. Then, as quickly as PowerPoint can manage, the video clip should play. Finally, after the clip is over, the video should disappear and your bullet points should slide onto the screen.
Here's how to do it:
Select the slide you plan to use, and enter its title and bullet points.
To place the video clip in the drawing layer, click the Clip Art icon on the Drawing toolbar; you can also choose Picture or Movies and Sounds from the Insert menu.
When PowerPoint asks, "Do you want your movie to play automatically in the slide show? If not, it will play when you click it," click Yes.
Resize the movie clip window and position it where you want the movie to appear. Ignore the bullet points for the time being—they won't be there when the video runs—and concentrate on getting the movie clip right.
Right-click the movie clip window and select Custom Animation. You'll see the movie file appear at the top of the timing review list, with a 0 next to it (indicating that the movie will run as soon as the slide appears).
Click the Text placeholder, and then click the Add Effect box on the Custom Animation pane to assign an effect for the slide's bullet points. In Figure 31.11, the Fly in effect is used. The bullet points appear in the timing review list directly below the animation.
Figure 31.11. The timing review list indicates that the Firework.avi animation will run before the bullet points appear.
Click the down arrow next to the media clip at the top of the timing review list. Choose Effect Options. In the Play Movie dialog box (see Figure 31.12), check the box to Hide While Not Playing, and choose Hide After Animation from the After Animation drop-down list. That ensures that the movie clip will play and then disappear, before the bullet points arrive.
Figure 31.12. Tell the movie clip to disappear when it's done playing.
Click the down arrow next to the Text 2 bullet point in the timing review list, and select Start After Previous. This ensures that the first bullet point will appear immediately after the movie clip finishes, and the movie itself vanishes from the slide.
Click Play on the Custom Animation pane and you'll see how all this ties together.
Tip from 
Loop and rewind options vary depending on the type of multimedia clip you select. To work with these settings, click the Effect and Timing tabs in the Play Movie dialog box.
Using CD Audio and Recorded Audio
You can use recorded audio (such as a narration) or a track from a music CD as a dramatic way to introduce a slide or a presentation. You could even use this technique in combination with a series of timed animations to run a dramatic series of slides, complete with audio, before you take the stage.
If you want to play a track from an audio CD as soon as a specific slide appears during a presentation, try this:
In Normal view, select the slide. Insert the CD you want to use in the PC's CD-ROM drive.
Tip from
If you have enabled CD AutoPlay on your system, Windows will begin playing an audio CD as soon as you insert it into the drive. When this happens, PowerPoint won't be able to take control of the CD to let you select a track. To give control back to PowerPoint, open the CD Player applet (choose Start, Programs, Accessories, Entertainment, CD Player), and stop the CD. Close the CD Player to let PowerPoint use the CD.
Choose Insert, Movies and Sounds, Play CD Audio Track. PowerPoint responds with the Movie and Sound Options dialog box (see Figure 31.13). Choose the track(s) you want to play and click OK.
Figure 31.13. As long as you have the CD in your PC's drive, PowerPoint automatically calculates how much time it will take to play the tracks you select.
PowerPoint asks whether you want your movie to play automatically in the slide show. If you want the CD track to start the moment this slide hits the screen, select Yes. If you select No, you'll have to click the slide's CD icon (which looks just like a CD) before the track(s) will play.
CD tracks have all the flexibility of any other kind of animation. PowerPoint can launch a CD audio track automatically, and individual tracks can appear in any order, before or after other animated elements on a slide.
Note
PowerPoint doesn't identify the actual CD in the CD-ROM drive; it knows only to play the tracks you've specified, no matter which CD might be in there. If you forget to put a CD in the drive when running a presentation, PowerPoint continues as if there were no track(s) to be played.
Similarly, if your PC has a functioning microphone, you can record a sound to be played with slides—you can even prerecord narration for every slide and, using timed advancing on the slides, deliver an entire presentation without being physically present. Choose Insert, Movies and Sounds, Record Sound, and follow the instructions.
Caution
Audio clips in presentations viewed over the Web can slow down the process horribly, unless the viewer has a very high speed connection.