Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Insert sound on your slides so that your presentation can play music, narration or other sound effects.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the PowerPoint presentation used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Adding Audio - Complete.pptx11.4 MB
Quick reference
Topic
Inserting audio into a slide.
When to use
To add sound associated with an animation, a slide transition, or to play on its own.
Instructions
- On the Insert tab, in the Media group, click the Audio drop-down arrow, and then click either:
- Audio from File, or
- Clip Art Audio, or
- Record Audio.
Clip art audio
- Click within the search bar, type in a search term, and either press Enter on the keyboard or click the search icon.
- Select an audio icon, and click Insert.
- Browse to the appropriate audio file on your computer, select it, and click either:
Audio from file
- Insert to insert the file, or
- The Insert drop-down arrow and select Link to File[GM1] Note that if you link to the audio file, the audio file must be distributed with the presentation or the audio won’t play.
In this version of PowerPoint, audio is embedded into the presentation by default.
When you insert audio into a presentation, PowerPoint will set it to play when clicked.
Login to download- 00:04 This video’s all about working with audio in PowerPoint. And over the years I always found audio a little bit difficult to work with, but later
- 00:10 versions of PowerPoint are very good at working with audio and it’s good to follow a few principles to make your life easier. Now I’ve got four
- 00:14 pictures on this slide; they're higgledy piggledy all over the place but when I run that animation in reading view, the first picture comes in and
- 00:23 the slide boundary actually crops the rest of the picture, so provided the picture’s in the right place it’s not too bad. I’d like to add some audio
- 00:33 to run with this presentation. Hit ESC on the keyboard; go back to our main slide area. So inserting audio, insert tab, the audio drop down
- 00:45 button. We can select audio from file, clipart, which is online, that we can search for, or even record audio, which is the subject of another
- 00:53 video, so audio from file, and browse to the particular audio and this is the one that I want. Notice on the insert tab, there’s also the option
- 01:02 to link to file and the actual music or the audio won’t be in your presentation, it will be beside it so you must distribute that with the presentation
- 01:11 or people won’t hear that at the destination. So click the insert button, PowerPoint goes away and actually inserts that audio onto the file.
- 01:20 Notice the little icon. I’ll grab the outside handle and make that bigger, as well as drag that up off the slide. Ok, now notice first of all, the audio
- 01:31 timeline so we get the option to play, very nice and that’s the audio that we’ll be working with, we can use the mouse to scrub to a particular
- 01:42 location; we’ve got little buttons to bump backwards and forward in tiny little increments, the length of the audio, as well as this little
- 01:51 audio mute/unmute as well as setting the level. Now the first thing that I need to do is actually grab this entry in the animation pane and drag it
- 02:02 right up to the front, because I want that audio to play immediately. So I go to reading view, click and the audio commences as soon as the first
- 02:13 animation fires. That’s very good. But rather than click, I’d like to make that happen automatically, so go to the animation tab, you can see the
- 02:22 various options, and over here I’m going to say, with previous, and then when we play in reading view, I’m not clicking, and that starts
- 02:34 automatically. So let’s have a look at a few of the options on the playback tab. select the audio, and the playback tab becomes available.
- 02:42 We can add a bookmark, which is the subject of another video, because that’s really about firing animations, we can fade in and fade out, we can
- 02:54 change the volume from low to medium to high, just like this little slider down here. We’ve also got the option here to start automatically, hide
- 03:01 during the slideshow. I prefer to drag it off the slide and then I know nothing can go wrong, and what I notice is that this particular animation
- 03:10 ends at 22 seconds, but if I scrub this audio, it goes for approximately a minute. So what I would like to is actually trim that audio so that it
- 03:20 actually plays relative to that presentation length. So we go into the trim audio feature; notice the start and the end so I simply grab
- 03:31 that, pull that back, and drop that at roughly 20 seconds, or indeed I could bump the timeline forward to the next frame and play that to
- 03:41 preview it, or if I want to be very exact, and sometimes you need to be, I can type those numbers in. So that works very well. Now we
- 03:49 notice in our scrubber that the audio only goes for about 20 seconds. The other thing that I’d like to do is actually fade the audio in at the
- 03:56 start and so I simply click this spinner and I’ll have a three second fade in. So let’s play that and see how that goes, we’ll go all the way
- 04:06 through. Oh, now that’s interesting. Hit ESC on the keyboard. So what happened there is the audio was actually a little bit too short and the
- 04:37 audio is about 20 seconds and I need to make it run to 22 seconds and that’s very simple to fix. Go to the playback tab again, the trim audio,
- 04:46 and what I need to do is, this end point, actually drag it back to say about 23 seconds to make sure that it actually runs past that in the timeline
- 04:56 and then if I wanted to I could also fade out. So inserting audio and working with audio in PowerPoint is so easy. You can insert it from
- 05:05 the insert tab, from file, or search for clipart as well as recording audio. You get a very good audio timeline, where you can play and scrub
- 05:14 and you get a whole bunch of playback options that help you work with audio. But remember that if you insert it that’s ok, but if you link to file
- 05:23 you must distribute that with the presentation or it’s not going to play at the other end and not only is that embarrassing, it’s a little bit, or very
- 05:30 unprofessional.
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