How to Integrate Music with PowerPoint

Whether you’re pitching your ideas at a company meeting or creating a slide show for your Hawaiian holiday, consider using music to jazz up your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Remember, pictures with sound have an amazing ability to attract and hold people’s attention, transport them to another time and place, conjure up memories, or provide humorous relief.

At the end of this quick tutorial, you will be able to add music or songs that play,

1. Automatically when you display a particular slide
2. When you click the sound icon on a particular slide
3. Over one or multiple slides

Before you begin

Make sure that you have a piece of music that is just right for your presentation. Your brilliant presentation just won’t work if you add the James Bond theme to your wedding photographs, will it?

If you don’t know from where to source the right background music, turn to the Internet. Check out royalty-free music websites such as www.premiumbeat.com that offer a wide range of legal production music for you to choose from. Just download the royalty free music for your slideshow, and you are ready to start.

Integrating music with your slideshow:

1. Open your presentation.
2. Select the slide where you would like to insert the music.
3. Take the cursor to the toolbar at the top of the window, and click on the Insert menu.
4. In the drop down box, select Movies and Sounds > Sound from File.

1. In the Insert Sound dialog box, select a sound file (WAV or MP3 format) from the royalty free music that you have downloaded from www.premiumbeat.com.
2. Click OK to insert the music into your presentation.

1. With PowerPoint, you can also decide if you would like the sound to play Automatically within the slide show or On Click.
   1. If you choose Automatically, the sound will start playing as soon as the slide is open.
   2. If you choose When Clicked, the sound will start playing when you double click on the sound icon.
   3. The sound will stop when the file ends or when you advance to the next slide.

1. After you have clicked either of the options, you will notice a small, sound icon in the center of your slide. We recommend that you hide it during your slide show. To do this, simply click on it and drag it off the slide.

1. PowerPoint also enables you to control when and how the music should play during the presentation.
2. To do this, use the Custom Animation panel. There are two ways to access this panel
   1. On the toolbar, select Slide Show > Custom Animation OR
   2. Right-click on the sound icon and select Custom Animation

1. First, select the When trigger. You can either choose to play the music:
   1. On Click: The track will begin to play when the mouse button is pressed.
   2. With Previous: This trigger allows you to play the track while other object/s are moving on the slide.
   3. After Previous: The track will begin to play after the previous animation event has finished.

1. To control How the track is played, click the Effect tab.

1. From here you will be able to control the start and stop timings for your music track. You can choose to start a track,
   1. From beginning
   2. From last position OR
   3. From time
2. To stop playing the track, use the Stop playing option. A track can be stopped,
   1. On click
   2. After the current slide OR
   3. After a specified number of slides
3. Now that you have made all the settings, go ahead and impress your audience!

This text may be copied in its totality and published on-line or otherwise but cannot be modified without permission.
Contact us at support@premiumbeat.com
Click here to sign up for our FREE newsletter!