Powerful PowerPoint Presentations – Enhance your slide presentations by recording an audio background

TechRepublic’s public relations manager recently called to ask me to help her with a PowerPoint question. She wanted to know how to record a narration to go along with a slide presentation. I told her that it’s easy—as long as her computer has a microphone. If your machine is equipped with microphones, adding an audio track to a slide show is a piece of cake.

Start recording, cue the sound, and click at the right time

The first step is to create your slide show. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to record an audio track. To do so, open PowerPoint’s Slide Show menu and select the Record Narration command. PowerPoint will then display the dialog box shown below.

Recording starts when the first slide appears. Read your narration or cue your sound track. Press Spacebar when you’re ready to proceed to the next slide. When you press Spacebar on the last slide in your presentation, PowerPoint will display the dialog box shown in Figure A. Click Yes or press [Enter], and PowerPoint will display the dialog box shown in Figure B. Click Yes or press [Enter] again to go to Slide Sorter view.

At that point, you’ll be able to tell at a glance how long each slide will be displayed. Figure C shows the number of seconds of audio I recorded for each slide in my sample presentation.

Note: The next time you run the slide show, it will proceed on autopilot, displaying each slide for as long as the associated audio track lasts.

Figure A

Figure B

Figure C