How to Insert Video and Audio in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013

There is a new and unique feature to be found in Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 that will make life easier for everyone using the presentation software. It used to be that if you wanted to insert video into your PowerPoint presentation you needed to have a file on your computer to open but now all that has changed.

Aside from being able to insert video from a file, Skydrive or embed code you can insert video into Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 directly from YouTube or via a Bing search right in the ‘Insert Video’ window. Perfect performance every time, no more lagging or failing videos; this really is making presentations easy.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013. In this section we’re going to take a look at multimedia in presentations and I’m going to do this by means of a couple of examples. First of all, I’m going to put some video into a presentation and then I’m going to add some sound. So let’s start with the video.

I’ve got a brand new presentation now. Let’s put in a new slide. We’re going to go for the title and content option and you’ll be familiar by now with the six little icons. We’ve used all of those except the one on the bottom right and that is Insert Video; so click on Insert Video and this brings up the Insert Video dialog. Now there are basically four possible sources for video to go into a PowerPoint 2013 presentation.

Now I’ve said that there are four options. There are sort of five options in a way but let’s just go through them; first of all from a file. If you have a video file in an appropriate format, you can browse to that file here and insert that. You can also ask PowerPoint to invoke a Bing video search to find an appropriate video. You need to be careful if you get a video from the web, you get all the same sort of copyright issues that you have with images. So if you’re putting together a presentation that is going to be made public in some way, do be aware of copyright and royalty issues. You can access and insert a video from your SkyDrive using this option. And if you have a video embed code, you could paste the video embed code in there. Now if you’ve used certain types of video services, then you may be aware of video embed codes. I’m not going to go into them in detail here, but if you know what they are, you can paste one into there. The sort of fifth option is the YouTube option which is really a variant on the above. But it is a very convenient way of inserting a video from YouTube. I could go through examples of each of these but really I think I’m just going to do the first one and that is to insert a video from a file because this is the one that offers us the most options and I’m going to leave you to experiment with the others.

So I click on Browse and that brings up an Insert Video dialog and it will show the videos that are available in selected folders. Now the list of video file formats is basically on this drop down. You may well not be able to see the whole thing. And I’ll talk about the video file formats later in this section. There are many of them and when I try to do this insert, it will only show me video files of these formats. So I believe the one I want is in that folder. There it is. It’s that one. It’s an AVI file so I can either double click that or I can select and click Insert and the video is inserted into my slide.

Now there are a couple of things to notice here. First of all, once you have an inserted video and the video is selected, you have the video tools, which is two additional tabs on the Ribbon. You have a Format tab and a Playback tab. We’re going to look at both of those in just a moment. You’ll also have a still from the video itself. This is not at this stage moving video. You have to actually play it and I’ll come back to that in a moment. But you’ll also see a set of play controls and they’re conventional kinds of play controls. So you’ve got a play and pause button, you’ve got buttons that label you to move back and move forward, and you’ve got a little time control and you’ve even got a sound volume control. So basically the video is there but we have a couple of issues in this particular case.

So let’s take a look at the Format tab first. The Format tab controls shouldn’t really hold any surprises for you. There are a couple of things such as video shape, video border, video effects in the middle here but really they are just shape, border, and effects. The main issue at the moment is that the video is lying on its side. It’s been taken, it’s basically a portrait video and it’s there in landscape mode. But you just rotate it. So in the Arrange Group on the Format tab, there is a button which enables us to do a rotate right 90 degrees. Now the play controls are hanging off of the bottom of the slide. So let me just drag the whole thing up to avoid that. Note that you have got sizing handles here. So you can resize the video if you need to, and you can also do corrections. So you could change brightness and contrast, for example, and perhaps most impressively of all, you have video styles. So let’s suppose I wanted to change this video style. Let’s go for something a little bit more, how about that for a video style? And then finally I’m not going to need a title on this one so let me just click on the title placeholder and delete it. My play controls are visible if I hover over it. But there we have my video ready to use.

Now let me just select the video again. If I now look at the Playback tab, the sort of controls I get on the Playback tab, I’m not going to go through all of them, but for instance in the Video Options Group here Start, two options are automatically. So you could have this video automatically start when you get to the slide or you can just say Start on click. I’m going to leave it at on click. You can also say play full screen or not. So do you want to fill the screen with this video? Do you want it to loop until the person running the presentation stops it? Do you want to rewind it after playing? You can also put in fade in/fade out and trim the video. If it’s too long, you can reduce it. You can take some off the beginning, some off the end; maybe just use a section in the middle or whatever. So the playback controls are really very powerful. The Format options are powerful as well. Let’s take a look at this video as it is though.

So I’m just going to go into Reading View for this and I’ll hover over the play controls. I might just drop the volume down a little bit. I’m not quite sure how loud this is going to be. So I’ll put the volume down to there and then I’ll click on play. (Video playing background noise.) And there’s the video playing on my PowerPoint 2013 slide. Hover over the controls and pause. And there we are; a video within a PowerPoint presentation. The alignment isn’t quite right as you can see, but that’s something that’s very easy to adjust.

So having had a look at the basics of putting video into a presentation, let’s add some sound. I’m going to put a title on this presentation. I’m going to call it Getting Wet. I’m going to just get rid of the subtitle and what I’m going to do is to put some sound on this first slide, this title slide. Now it’s quite often the case that if you’re given a presentation the audience will arrive and you may well decide to have the first slide up and maybe a bit of music playing in the background. Now what I’m going to use here is not music. I’m going to use a sound effect and I don’t think you’d probably play this sound effect over a long period of time. But I want to show you one of the ways of inserting sound into a presentation and talk about one or two of the other ways. So what I’m going to do is to put effectively a background sound on this first slide.

So the first slide is selected. I click on the Insert tab and then at the right hand end of the Insert tab is Audio. Click on the drop down at the bottom of audio and I’m given three options. I can choose online audio which is the option I’m going to choose. I can choose audio on my PC which lets me insert audio from my computer or from a network. I can even pick up audio from say a CD or something like that. Note the usual copyright issues. And then the third option is record audio. You can actually record your own audio, perhaps your own narration or your own music to include in your presentation. But on this occasion, we’re going to go for the first option, online audio.

That brings up the Insert Audio dialog and the option we have there is to search Office.com ClipArt. So I’m going to search for something related to water. So enter the word Water, click on the Search button. And I’ve got 69 ClipArt sounds which relate to water. Sprinklers, jungle waterfalls. What should we go for? Let’s go for rushing water. So click on Insert and the sound is inserted. Now don’t be put off by the visible play control. You’re not really going to want that stuck in front of the title of your presentation. I’ll come back to that in just a moment. The icon in the middle, the speaker icon, is basically the thing you select in order to format this sound. Now you get a set of play controls pretty much similar to the video play controls. I think I’m going to reduce the volume a little bit just in case, and then you have audio tools tabs on the Ribbon. So you have Format tab and you have a Playback tab.

Now I just want to adjust a couple of the playback settings to demonstrate this at work. Now you may have this sound attached to another object in the presentation or you may have it as a free standing play control as we’ve got here. But if you want this as background music and you want no sign that there is a sound linked here, you just want it to appear like magic that music plays when you get to this slide, then you click on the option here in Audio options, Hide during show. You need to be a little bit careful about that though because with Hide during show you won’t be able to see the play control which means if you need to be able to control it you’re either going to need to know a relevant keyboard shortcut or you will have needed to set something up to control it. Now that’s beyond the scope of what we’re doing here but I am going to say Hide and the reason I’m going to say hide is this. To the left of that, there is an option that says Play across slides. If I checked that, this sound would play across all the slides in the presentation. And if I clicked the one below that, Loop until stopped, it would keep going on and on and on until I stopped it. And the way of stopping it might well be to end the presentation. Now I don’t want this particular sound to play on all slides. So I just want it to play on the current slide but I am going to loop it. So what this is going to do is to say on this slide, just the title slide, the play control will be hidden; so hide during show. The sound will loop but it would just be on this slide. So let’s see that at work. Let’s go into Reading View.

We’ll be going to Slide 1, the title slide (rushing water sound), and you can hear the rushing water. That will loop continuously until I go to the next slide. And, of course, on the next slide it’s silent and, of course, I’ve got my video here. So if I go to the controls for that or indeed just click on the still image itself, it plays the video.

So that’s an introduction to how to insert video and sound into your PowerPoint 2013 presentations. There is a very useful page in the PowerPoint Help, video and audio file format supported in PowerPoint. This lists in the first section the video formats and in the second section the sound formats that you can insert into a PowerPoint 2013 presentation. Earlier versions of PowerPoint did not support all of these. So if you’re used to an older version, you may be pleased for example to find that the MOV, the QuickTime format is now supported, for example.

So now we have one last exercise for you to do, and the last exercise for you to do is a pretty straightforward one again. I’d like you to find a piece of music, some sort of sound effect, and I would like you to add it to the title slide of your final presentation. Now example-16 in the supplied files is the almost final version of the short presentation about the UK Parliament. So you should have an equivalent of example-16. And I’d like you to add this music or sound to the first slide. I’ve added music to example-17 which is the last sample file. It’s on the first slide. It loops and it’s hidden. So basically when you open the presentation, it’s sort of the music that will be playing at the beginning of the presentation and just before I move on to say the second slide and start talking. So I’d like you to do the equivalent either to example-16 or to your most recent presentation and I’ll see you in the next section.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!