Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 23. Adding Multimedia and Movement

Here’s where PowerPoint gets fun—livening up your slides with video, sound, and motion. Although content is always king, you can grab and keep your audience’s attention by adding video and audio clips, animating text and images, and creating transitions between slides.

PowerPoint 2010 makes snazzing up your presentations easier than ever. You can now edit media clips right within the program, doing things like trimming clips and adding bookmarks to help get straight to the point. And animating objects on your slides is a snap. The Animations tab now displays a gallery of options right on the ribbon. Transitions get their own tab, too, along with some cool new styles—including 3-D effects—for these between-slide effects. This chapter will teach you to use PowerPoint to make your presentations will snap, crackle, and pop.

Putting Media Clips in a Presentation

Just because it’s you up on the podium doesn’t mean you need to do all the talking. Videos and sound recordings give you (and your audience) a break. And if you’re creating a presentation for viewers to watch on their own, media clips can add a soundtrack and provide a break from reading what’s on the screen.

This section tells you how to add, format, and edit media clips—including how to bookmark and trim clips so you can play exactly the parts you want.

Adding Video from Your Hard Drive

The quickest route to getting that video on a slide goes like this: Insert a new slide with a content ...