Adding Audio

Quick reference

• 00:03 Inserting audio onto slides is something that I’ve found difficult to do from time to time but it’s easier to do if you follow a few principles and the
• 00:10 more recent versions of PowerPoint allow us to work with sound much more easily. Now notice on this slide that I’ve got four images inserted
• 00:18 and they’re all higgledy piggledy and it doesn’t even matter if certain parts of the images go beyond the slide boundary because nobody will
• 00:24 see those parts. Now I’d like to add some music to run with the presentation so when the animations are running I simple hit the ESC on
• 00:31 the keyboard to stop them; go to the insert tab and the audio dropdown arrow. We can select from audio online, audio on my PC or even
• 00:43 record audio which is the subject of another video. So I click audio on my PC, the file that I’m looking for happens to be located here. And
• 00:51 notice the little arrow beside the insert button which allows us to either directly insert the audio or link to file. I personally wouldn’t link to
• 00:58 file unless you’ve got a very good reason to do so because if you do then you need to make sure that audio file goes with the presentation or
• 01:06 the person at the receiving end will not hear your audio. So we go insert and there is our audio icon on the slide. I’ll just grab the handles of that
• 01:16 audio icon and drag with the mouse to expand it to make it a little bit bigger; I’ll also move this audio icon off the slide up here. Notice, when
• 01:24 the audio icon is selected, that we can see the audio timeline and that is the way that we can play the audio. Very nice. But we can also scrub
• 01:33 along the audio timeline to a particular location with our mouse, bump it backwards and forwards in very small increments, and we get a
• 01:42 time indicator of the position where we are, as well as being able to change the actual volume level to either increase or decrease that volume
• 01:50 level. Now notice in the animation pane that the audio is set to play on click. So I click the audio entry with the mouse and drag it up to the
• 01:59 commencement or the top of the timeline. Now when I run the slideshow, the sound will commence when I click, and the animation of
• 02:07 the pictures will follow so let’s go to reading view, click and so the sound fired and the first picture animated in and so forth. Hit ESC on the
• 02:19 keyboard and were out of reading view back into our application window. If I wanted to fire that animation sequence without a mouse click, I
• 02:27 would go to the start drop down button, with previous, and in reading view, which is really a slideshow in a window, the animation sequence
• 02:34 commences automatically. Now we’re really starting to get into the whole area of animation and animations are really the subject of other
• 02:40 videos. Now I’ve moved the sound icon off the slide so that nobody’s going to see it during a slideshow, however, if we go to the playback tab
• 02:49 we can see located here are various audio options including to start automatically, we can change the volume from low to medium, high or
• 02:59 even mute it. We can have it play across slides, and even have the sound loop from the end of the audio to the start of it again until some other
• 03:08 event occurs that stops the sound file, such as moving to the next slide in our slideshow. So let’s change the fade in option to fade in over 3
• 03:16 seconds. We won’t concern ourselves with adding a fade out period just yet. We go to reading view and, and so that’s the result of that,
• 03:27 the sound gradually fades in and it sounds quite nice. Now, if we look at this last entry in our animation timeline, that animation will conclude
• 03:37 at about 22 seconds. However, the particular audio file runs for approximately a minute, so what I’d like to do now is to actually trim the end
• 03:47 of the audio, so click the playback tab, trim audio, and I grab the handle or the marker that shows the end of the audio and I can drag that
• 03:57 back to approximately 20 seconds. Or I can use the spinner or even type in the exact value directly into the end time field. Click ok, and the
• 04:07 audio is trimmed to about the 20 second mark, so let’s add a 2 second fade out at the end of the audio and let’s play that and see what
• 04:16 happens. Now the audio actually stopped a little bit too soon before the end of the animation sequence so I need to actually extend the end
• 04:50 trim point a little bit. So we go to the playback tab, the trim audio button, and we can extend that trim point a little bit provided that we haven't
• 04:58 compressed the audio because then we would lose that and give ourself a bit more time so any original trimming is entirely able to be undone.
• 05:06 Now if I right click on that sound entry in the animation pane we get the play audio dialog box so we can play from the beginning, stop playing
• 05:14 on click, or after current slide, or after a number of slides. So don’t be scared about inserting and using audio. Try inserting it, remember that you
• 05:23 can drag it off the slide so the audience can’t see it and that’s the option I prefer even though you can set a check mark to hide it, you can
• 05:30 fade in you can fade out, you can trim it, and note that bookmarks are a subject of another video because they are really about firing
• 05:38 animation.

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