Inserting “Audio”

Whether we want to add music to serve as background for our presentation, to play sound between two slides, or add sound to an animation in the slide, it doesn’t matter, all this can be done in “PowerPoint”.
To add sound to a slide, first select the “Insert” tab in the “Ribbon”.
Click on the downward pointing arrow on the “Audio” button.

 

This opens a drop-down menu with different options.
The first option is “Sound from File” — this allows us to insert a sound on our computer. This is also the option you’d have got if you had clicked on the upper part of the “Audio” button.

The second option is “Sound from Clip organizer”. If you select this option, the “Clip Art” task pane will be opened with all the sound files from the gallery.

The third option is “Play CD audio track”. For this we select a sound from a CD we want (discussed in the next lesson ).

The last option we have is “Record Sound”.
You can select this when you want to add narration to your presentation. Obviously, you need to have a microphone available.

In this example I’m selecting a sound from the “Clip Organizer” to be inserted, so I select the “Sound from Clip Organizer …” option.
This opens the “Clip Art” task pane, as previously mentioned.
When the mouse pointer moves over the various files, a downward pointing arrow appears next to the file.

Clicking this, opens a drop-down menu with the option “Preview / Properties”.
If you click it, the “Preview / Properties” dialog opens and an example of this sound will be played.

By clicking on the “Previous” or “Next” buttons you can listen or navigate between the different sound files in the gallery.
Click the “Close” button at the bottom of this dialog box when you have heard enough and have selected the file you want to insert.

To insert the sound file, we have two options.
The first and the fastest is to double-click the file, in the “Picture Window”.
A second way is, to move your mouse pointer over the file in the “Picture Window”.
Click the downward arrow button and select “Insert” from the drop-down menu.
Whatever you do, it does not matter. In both cases, this opens a dialog box, asking how we would like to start the sound.

Select “Automatic” if you want to play the sound automatically, and select “When Clicked” if you want the sound to start playing only when you have clicked on the icon.

I go for the first option, so I select “Automatic”.

This places the sound icon on our slide.
The tools for sounds will be opened in the “Ribbon” with the “Options” contextual tab selected.
I’ll quickly go through this once.
The first “Preview” option, plays an example of the sound.
The second option, “Slideshow volume”, seems clear to me.

The third option, “Hide during show”,is to hide the sound icon when we play the show. Checking this option would be your best choice if you had chosen to automatically play the sound but, if you had selected the other option, “When Clicked”, then you would not know where to click if this option isn’t selected. Sounds quite logical.

The fourth option, “Loop Until stopped”, is for the sound to be repeated until you finish the show.
In the fifth option, we have a drop down menu, so you can click on the downward pointing arrow and make your choice.
We have already seen the first two but the third option, “Play across slides”, plays the sound on all the slides. In other words, even if you go to the next slide, the sound will continue playing.

And using the last option, we can set the “Maximum sound file size”(in KB) of the sound file .
If the file is larger, then it is not inserted, but there is a link inserted to this file.
Please note that when you move your show to another folder on your computer, or you are mailing your idea to a friend or colleague, you must also send the file with this “link”.

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