Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 24. 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.

With PowerPoint, you can 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 styles—including 3-D effects—for these between-slide effects. Thanks to you and PowerPoint, 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 That’s Stored on Your Computer

The quickest route to getting that video from your computer and onto a slide goes like this: Insert a new slide with a content box and, inside the content box, click the Insert Video ...