Ms Office Tune Up

Not all slide shows are presented in person. As you learn in the next section, you can set up a slide show to run automatically in a kiosk or booth. More commonly, you might share a presentation with remote users. For example, you can send a presentation to another per­son as an email attachment or on a CD, you can put the presentation on a shared network folder, or you can publish the presentation to a Web site. In all these scenarios, you obvi­ously cannot present the slide show in person. However, you can do the next best thing and record narration to go along with each slide. When remote users open your presentation and run the slide show, they hear your voice along with each slide. PowerPoint can also store slide timings with your narration.

CAUTION

Note that unlike Rehearse Timings, PowerPoint’s Narration feature doesn’t give you any way to start over on a particular slide.Therefore, make sure you’re comfortable with your presentation before you begin.You might want to have your notes or handouts on hand,just in case you need them.

Here are the steps to follow to add narration to a slide show:

1. Plug in your computer’s microphone, if you haven’t done so already.
2. Choose Slide Show, Record Narration. PowerPoint displays the Record Narration dia­log box, shown in Figure 1.


Figure 1 Use the Record Narration dialog box to set up the microphone level and sound quality for your narration.

3. Click Set Microphone Level to open the Microphone Check dialog box. Talk normally into the microphone, and PowerPoint adjusts the sound level to match your voice. When the level stabilizes (that is, when the green bars that signal the audio level stop moving), click OK.
4. Click Change Quality to open the Sound Selection dialog box. Either use the Name list to select a predefined sound quality (CD Quality, Radio Quality, or Telephone Quality) or use the Attributes list to select a specific quality level. (The higher the kb/sec value, the better the quality and the more disk space the recording uses.) Click OK when you’re done.
5. If you want PowerPoint to create separate .wav files for the narration (one for each slide), click to activate the Link Narrations In check box. (The default location is your user profile’s Documents folder; it’s My Documents in pre-Vista computers. You can change that by clicking the Browse button.)
6. Click OK.
7. For each slide, present the material just as you would during an actual presentation. Speak at your normal speed and voice level. If you need to stop temporarily, right-click the slide and then click Pause Narration.
8. When the slide show ends, PowerPoint asks if you also want to save the slide timings. Click Save to preserve the timings or Don’t Save to discard them.

When the recording is done, PowerPoint switches to Slide Sorter view.

TIP

What do you do if you already have existing audio that you want to apply to a slide? For example, you might have a message from the company CEO or audio from a training video. In this case, navi­gate to the slide, choose Insert, and click the top half of the Sound split button to display the Insert Sound dialog box. Click the audio file you want to apply to the slide and then click OK. In the dialog box that displays, click Automatically, which tells PowerPoint to play the audio clip as soon as you navigate to this slide in the presentation.

Technorati Tags: narration slide show, powerpoint 2007

Popularity: 4% [?]