There are plenty of audio and music options available in PowerPoint if you want to give your audience a break from your voice.
We’ll go beyond the simple ‘adding music’ help to give some practical advice for audio in presentations:
- opening or closing music
- playing one song after another
- music playing over the entire presentation
- play a sound effect only when clicked
- changing the look of default Audio icon
- Change the audio icon to one you prefer.
You will find the audio basics at Insert | Media | Audio
Choose a music/audio file from your computer and it’ll be added to the current slide.
Click on the icon to see the design controls. There’s the usual play, pause, forward and back options. The middle bar shows the progress of the audio as played, you can drag that forward and back. At the right is volume control.
When NOT selected, the audio element appears as a speaker icon like this.
That icon can be made smaller or bigger, which is what we’ve done in the above example. The usual practice is to tuck the icon away in a corner of the slide.
So far, so obvious. But there’s a lot more you can do beyond that. Look on the ribbon with the audio selected to see a wide range of choices.
And beyond that, modern PowerPoint brings audio into animations for more complex tricks.
Change the PowerPoint audio/music speaker icon
Play audio only when clicked on a PowerPoint slide
Converting MP3 to MP4 audio for PowerPoint
Record Narration and Timings in PowerPoint
