Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter IV.8. Presenting Sounds and Movies

In This Chapter

• Rehearsing your presentation

• Adding music and sound

• Making a smooth transition

• Incorporating video

• Using custom animation

• Dealing with eccentricities

Rich media, also known broadly as multimedia, enhances your presentations. You can add music, sounds, movies, and YouTube videos to your PowerPoint presentations. You can also add your own voice narrations to individual slides. PowerPoint may be 25 years old, but it's been keeping up with the times and knows about Web 2.0. This chapter helps you incorporate the rich media that can make your presentations interesting.

For the most part, working with audio in PowerPoint is straightforward. We cover the basics first. At the end of this chapter, we talk about some of the "gotchas" in details about using sounds and music.

Speaking to Your Audience

You may want to create a narrated version of your presentation that you can distribute. You can't be everywhere, and even though your audience won't get the benefit of your physical presence, they'll at least be able to hear you while they enjoy your slide show. We cover a method of adding sounds during our Slide Sorter View discussion in Book IV, Chapter 1, but we don't talk about narrating slides in that chapter.

PowerPoint has two features that are almost the same. Both of them play the slide show while you rehearse it. While you rehearse, both features record how much time you spend on each slide. When you're done, PowerPoint offers to let you ...