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Today’s Tech Tip: Music in Powerpoint Presentations March 29, 2007

Posted by Steve in : Tech Tips , trackback

TECH TIP FOR POWERPOINT:

At Park, we use a lot of Powerpoint presentations as we meet with our leaders in order to share our vision to reach 1% of Chicago with the Gospel. Many people want to play music in their Powerpoint presentations. Usually, inserting music only works slide by slide. So how do you insert music or narration that continues throughout the presentation (for PowerPoint 2002 or 2003.)

Follow these six steps:

  1. Create your Powerpoint presentation.
  2. Upon completion, choose Insert, Movies and Sounds, then choose one of the options, such as Sound From File. Locate the sound and insert it. (You see a sound icon, which you can drag off the slide if you don’t want it to appear during your presentation.)
  3. Then you will see a message appears asking how you want the sound to play. Usually, you choose Automatically, but if you want the sound to wait for your mouse click, choose When Clicked.
  4. Next, you right-click the sound’s icon and choose Custom Animation from the shortcut menu. The Custom Animation pane opens with your sound file listed.
  5. Click the arrow directly to the right of the sound icon and choose Effect Options. In the Play Sound dialog box, choose the Effects tab.
  6. In the Stop Playing section, choose the After XXX slides option. Enter a large number (up to 999) in the box so the sound will play throughout all your slides. Note: PowerPoint counts each display as a slide, so if you show some slides more than once, they count.
  7. Click OK to close the dialog box.

Comments»

1. Patti - April 13, 2007

Hi Steve - I downloaded a song in I-tunes and I’m not able to insert it into my powerpoint slide show. When I try, I get a message that states: “PP cannot insert a sound from the selected file. Verify the path and file format are correct and then try again.”
Note: The only way to see the song is changing the ‘file type’ to “All files”.
If you are able to help me, I would appreciate it very much. I’m putting together a slideshow for my grandparents….thank you!!
Patti

2. Steve - April 16, 2007

I would guess that this file was downloaded in Apple’s proprietary format which Windows does not recognize. I don’t know if there is a program out there to convert these to MP3 or WMA.

You may wish to re-download the file from Walmart or some other music service in a non-Apple format.