Last Updated on
When making your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, you may want to embed it with other forms of media including videos and audio.
This can make your presentation way more engaging for your audience – but not many people actually know how to embed audio to a PowerPoint presentation.
Check out the below guide to find out how you can add audio to your presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint.
How To Add External Audio To Powerpoint Presentations
Step
Get Your Audio Source Ready
When you want to add an external audio source to your PowerPoint, you will need to make sure that you are using a supported type of audio file. PowerPoint supports WAV, MP3, and MID audio files so your audio file needs to be one of these types.
If not, you can use an online converter to turn your audio into an MP3 file.
Once your audio file is ready and saved on your computer, you can move onto the next step.
Step
Inserting Your Audio
Now that your audio is ready, you can open up your PowerPoint presentation and select the slide you want to add your audio to.
Once you are on the correct slide, head up to the top tab menu and select the Insert option on the left hand side of the menu. This will open up the Insert menu.
On the Insert menu, you will see the icon of a speaker with sound waves on the right hand side in the Media section. This is the ‘Audio’ button. Select it and from the drop down menu that will appear, select the ‘Audio on my PC’ option.
This will bring up a separate window for you to find your audio file on your PC. Find it, select it and then click the ‘Insert’ button when ready.
This will embed the slide with your audio in the form of a little icon of a grey speaker.
Step
Select Your Audio Options
There are actually quite a few options when it comes to playing your audio file.
To check them out, you need to select your audio with your cursor to bring up the Audio Tools menu on the top ribbon menu.
Then, select the drop down menu next to the ‘Start’ icon in the Audio Options section. Using the various options on offer here, you can select a few to try out different ways to play your audio.
You can select options like ‘Loop until Stopped’ so your audio continues to play while the slide is on the screen, ‘Play across Slides’ so your single piece of audio plays for the whole presentation, or ‘automatically’ so your audio instantly begins when you switch to the slide.
The most common option that most people use is the ‘When Clicked On’ so the audio does not start until you have selected the audio’s icon on your slide using your cursor.
This will allow you to have total control over when to stop and start your audio while presenting.
Find the right audio options for you and select them. Once that is done, your audio will be ready for presenting!
Conclusion
So, embedding audio into your PowerPoint presentation is super easy as long as your audio is already a correct type of audio file that is compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint. If it isn’t, then it’s no big deal – there’s plenty of free audio converters available online!
Once that’s done, you can check out our above guide and follow each step one by one to correctly add audio to your PowerPoint presentation. Add one continuous audio file or a different one for every slide – the choice is yours!
