Ms Office Tune Up

When you display a slide, it’s often desirable to play a short video clip to introduce the slide content. This might be a short movie related to the slide’s topic, a message from the com­pany president or other person, an animated clip that demonstrates the task described in the slide, and so on. To add a movie to a slide, choose the Insert tab, click the top half of the Movie split button, and then use the Insert Movie dialog box to select the video file you want to play on the slide.

TIP

PowerPoint (indeed, all of the Office 2007 applications) comes with a large number of animated GIF images. (An animated GIF is essentially a sequence of GIF still images combined into a single file.) These are part of Office 2007’s Clip Art collection.To add an animated GIF to your slide, choose the Insert tab, click the lower half of the Movie split button, and then click Movie from Clip Organizer. In the Clip Art window that displays, you see a clip for all the available animated GIFs.

In this kind of situation, it’s ideal to display the slide, run the video, remove the video from the slide, and then display the slide’s regular content. This requires several animation effects, as described in the following steps:

1. Add and format your regular slide.
2. Insert the video clip into your slide. When PowerPoint asks how you want the movie to start, click Automatically. This means that PowerPoint will begin running the video right away when you navigate to the slide.
3. Move and size the video as needed. If the video now covers the placeholder for any of the slide’s content, select the video, choose the Options tab, and then click the top half of the Send to Back split button.
4. Choose Animations, Custom Animation to display the Custom Animation task pane. Note that PowerPoint has added two items to the animation list: one for the video itself (numbered 0) and one for a trigger created by PowerPoint (which you can ignore).
5. In the animation list, pull down the menu associated with the video and then click Effect Options. PowerPoint displays the Play Movie dialog box.
6. Click the Movie Settings tab and then click to activate the Hide While Not Playing check box. This ensures that the video window disappears when it stops playing.
7. Click OK.
8. Select all the content placeholders on the slide, including the title and bullets.
9. In the Custom Animation task pane, click Add Effect, click Entrance, and then click the effect you want to use to bring the content onto the slide.
10. In the Start menu, click After Previous. This tells PowerPoint to bring in the slide content after the video has stopped playing.

TIP

You may find that PowerPoint brings in the slide content one object at a time.That happens because you applied the After Previous value to the content objects. If you want all of the slide content to display at the same time, select the content effects, except the first one, and then use the Start menu to click With Previous.

TIP

In some cases, the slide content displays a little before the video finishes.To stop this from happen­ing, add a slight delay to the content effect. In the animation list, select all of the content effects, pull down the menu associated with those effects, and then click Effect Options. In the Timing tab, change the Delay setting to 0.5 seconds and then click OK.

Technorati Tags: playing video, introduction slide, powerpoint 2007

Popularity: 3% [?]