Adding Animation, Sound, and Movies to Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007

Inserting, Playing, and Modifying Movies

Sometimes the best way to ensure that your audience understands your message is to show a movie, also known as a video. For example, if your company has developed a short advertising video, it makes more sense to include the video in a presentation about marketing plans than to try and describe it with bullet points or even still pictures. You can insert the following types of movies in slides:

• Video clips. You can insert a digital video that has been saved as a file in one of two ways: If a slide’s layout includes a content placeholder, you can click the Insert Movie button in the placeholder. You can also click the Movie button in the Media Clips group on the Insert tab. Either way, the Insert Movie dialog box opens so that you can select the file. Before PowerPoint inserts the file, you specify whether the video should play automatically when the slide containing it appears or whether it should play only when you click it.

• Animated clips. PowerPoint comes with several animated clips, also known as animated GIFs. (GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format.) You insert these animated objects by clicking the Movie arrow in the Media Clips group on the Insert tab, and then clicking Movie From Clip Organizer to display the Clip Art task pane, where you can select the clip you want. If you are connected to the Internet, clicking the Clip Art On Office Online link in the task pane takes you to the Microsoft Office Online Clip Art and Media Web site, from which you can download hundreds of clip art images, photos, sounds, and animated clips.

Both videos and animated clips appear on the slide as objects represented by icons that you can size and move to meet your needs. When you select an animated clip object, PowerPoint adds a Format contextual tab to the Ribbon so that you can adjust the way it looks on the slide. When you select a movie object, PowerPoint also adds an Options contextual tab so that you can adjust the object’s size and position, its volume, how it is displayed on the slide, and how it is activated.

In Normal view, you can preview a video by double-clicking its icon or by clicking the Preview button in the Play group on the Options contextual tab. You can preview the action of an animated clip by clicking the arrow that appears when you select it in the Clip Art task pane and then clicking Preview/Properties. In Slide Show view, a video plays either automatically or when you click its icon, depending on your specifications, whereas an animated clip always plays automatically.

In this exercise, you will insert a video file as an object on a slide, preview the video, and then modify its settings.

1. Display Slide 3 in Normal view. Then in the content placeholder, click the Insert Media Clip button.

2. In the Insert Movie dialog box, browse to your Documents\Microsoft Press\PowerPoint2007SBS\Media folder, and double-click the HouseHome file. Then when a message box asks how you want the video to start, click When Clicked.

   The video is inserted as an object in the middle of Slide 3.

3. Resize the video object until it occupies most of the area below the slide title and is aligned with the left end of the title.

   

   Figure 7-10

4. On the Options contextual tab, in the Play group, click the Preview button to play the video in Normal view.

5. Switch to Slide Show view, and then in the displayed slide, click the video object.

The video starts to play.

6. Click the video object once to pause the video, and again to resume playing the video. When the video finishes, press the key to return to Normal view.

7. With the video object still selected, in the Movie Options group on the Options contextual tab, select the Loop Until Stopped check box.

   Now the movie will play repeatedly until you stop it.

8. Double-click the video object. After the video starts a second time, click the video object to stop the movie.

9. In the Movie Options group, click the Play Movie arrow, and then in the list, click Automatically.

   The video will now begin playing as soon as Slide 3 is displayed.

10. Preview the movie in both Normal view and Slide Show view to see the effects of your changes.