Movies


 * Movies and sound**

While over-burdening your presentation with the addition of other media is a real danger, there are certainly instances where bringing in these outside resources can help your presentation. Proceed with caution.

GIF movies: These are short, animated cartoons—a stock ticker, a hovering ghost, a car with spinning wheels, for example—that can be used to illustrate your slides. They play for the duration of the slide and then disappear when you change the slide. You can find GIF clips in some of the Clip Galleries that come with some versions of PowerPoint or from the Web.

To insert these clips into a slide: choose Insert à Movies and Sounds à Movies from Gallery. This will take you to the pre-loaded clips, which you can preview and then, by double-clicking, insert.

To add non-GIF movies that you have saved on your desktop, simple follow this same procedure but select Movies from File…. The movies you import need to be QuickTime-compatible. When you insert a movie, you will get a dialogue box that will give you several options for how the movie can appear in the slide.

Important: when you insert a movie, you are actually inserting a link that will open the original movie file. This means that the original movie file must be close by when you run the PowerPoint presentation or it will not run. To insure that it will run, create a folder for the PowerPoint presentation and then put the PowerPoint file in this folder along with the file of the inserted movie.