Adding Audio

Quick reference

• 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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