Specifications

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Use music and sounds in
presentations: Have music,
will travel
Adding sounds or music to a
presentation can be tricky —
especially if you plan to present on
another computer.
Q“How do you get music from
a CD to play without breaks
through an entire PowerPoint
presentation? In other words, how
do I embed music for a smooth
presentation?”
— Sing-Along Sam
Dear Sam,
The only way to get music from a
CD to play without breaks between
the songs is to create a single file (in
a format PowerPoint supports, such
as *.wav) that’s made up of all the
songs strung together. However, I
can neither sanctify nor condone
illegally messing around with a
pre-made CD that you purchased
legally and lawfully. On the other
hand, if it’s a homemade CD that
you made on your four-track, go for
it.
After your music is all wrapped
up nicely in a single file, you insert
it into your presentation and off you
go. Talk about smooooooth.
And this brings up another issue:
Let’s say that you (not you, Sam, the
general public “you”) create a
presentation with sound and music
on your home computer. Why, then,
is there dead silence when you
present it on another computer,
thereby forcing you to hum the
theme to Hawaii Five-O for the last
17 slides? There are a couple of
possible answers to this question:
The music is a linked file
(instead of an embedded file), and
it’s linked to a source (such as a
piece of music) that lives on your
home computer.
The problem with this is that your
while your presentation is
desperately looking for the music
file, the music file is at home on
your computer, twiddling its thumbs
and waiting for something to do.
This is akin to offering to pay for
that expensive dinner when you
realize your wallet is in your other
jacket or purse. While your date
might believe that story out of pity,
it doesn’t solve the problem.
Your file is embedded but it’s in
a format that PowerPoint doesn’t
recognize.
When this happens, PowerPoint
decides for itself to add the file as a
link, not as an embedded object. (Of
course it doesn’t tell you first, so
you spend the next five hours trying
all the wrong things and cursing
Microsoft. You think we don’t hear
you?) Sound files need to be in
*.wav format to embed them in a
presentation. Don’t say I never told
you.
The size of your embedded files
is more than 50 megabytes (MB).
You’ve embedded the file, so it
should have traveled nicely from
one computer to the next. But it’s a
lengthy piece (think Brahms’ Tragic
Overture, think Pink Floyd’sSheep),
thereby forcing PowerPoint to add it
as a linked file. The default setting
for automatically linking sound files
is 100 kilobytes (KB), but you can
change it to 50,000 KB (50 MB).
However, remember that this will
substantially increase the overall
size of your presentation, so be
aware that it might take some time
to open it.
To change the default setting
for linking files
1. On the Tools menu, click Op tions.
2. On the Gen eral tab, in crease the
Link sounds with file size greater
than ___ Kb set ting to a size just
larger than your larg est sound file,
up to 50,000 KB (50 MB).
3. Click OK.
Create templates: What,
ours aren’t good enough for
you?
Some features in PowerPoint are
customizable and some aren’t. The
trick is to know which is which.
Q“I have to find a way to
make my own slide layouts and
move some of these 24 preset
layouts out for a break! I work in a
laboratory environment, and my
technician just needs a layout to
plug in three pictures and three
areas of explanatory text and a
couple more combinations. So I
intend to build a variety of presets
layouts and voilB! Can I?”
— A Questioning Québécois
Dear Québécois,
You say you work in a lab and
you want to send our pre-made slide
layouts “out for a break”? What
exactly does that entail? A
run-around hamster wheel? A swim
in a beaker? A fly-by over a Bunsen
burner?
The bad news is that you can’t
build slide layouts yourself. What
you get is what you get—they’re
stubborn little things. The good
news is that you can create design
templates that will accomplish the
same goal. Search for this article on
http://office.microsoft.com/, which
explains how to create a template:
Working with templates in PowerPoint 2002
Vo i l B yourself, monsieur. Now go
mix up a potion or something.
Q“I read your article about
customizing templates for
presentations but I just don’t know
how to change the background.
I’ve imported a piece of clip art
into a presentation, but how do I
make it the background? Currently
it is in FRONT of the text.”
— Template Temptress