What is a multimedia presentation? Lean how to mix and match images, audio, video and text in your PowerPoint presentation to capture attention better.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Aug 30, 2022 • 12 min readWhat is a multimedia presentation? You've probably heard the term multimedia, but what does it actually mean in PowerPoint?
In short, it's combining many types of media in your presentation. You can use combinations of images, audio, and video to make your point.
Every PowerPoint slide is a blank canvas. It's just waiting for your content to reinforce your speaking points or guide the presentation. Multimedia brings variety to your slides and helps visual learners understand your content better.
You probably already know how to work with text. So, I'll show you how to combine multiple types of media into the same PowerPoint presentation. You'll learn how to insert multimedia and edit it inside PowerPoint. Multimedia presentations hold more interest and engage your audience better when done well.
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If we were bound to using only text and shapes, it would be much harder to hold an audience's attention during a presentation.
You can define a multimedia presentation as a presentation that uses more than one type of media to reach the audience.
Multimedia exists to help reinforce our key speaking points. Here are a few ideas for working with images, audio, and video to make your presentation more interesting:
Discover high-quality PowerPoint presentation templates on Envato Elements like the popular Snow template we use in the slide above.
Before we dive in, always remember: less is more. It's great to incorporate multimedia in PowerPoint. But don't clutter slides with too many distractions for your audience.
Let's walk through multimedia together in this quick screencast. In it, I'll teach you how to insert each type of multimedia and make basic edits to them.
PowerPoint also has tools inside the app to add basic edits to your multimedia. You can crop images, trim video clips, and adjust audio levels. I'll show you how to use each of these tools, so that you don't have to open other apps to work with multimedia quickly.
If you want more detail on how to work with each of those types of multimedia, check out the step-by-step tutorial below on how to add multimedia to your presentations.
Multimedia is helpful in presentations to keep your audience's attention. Here's how to add multimedia to your presentation:
For this tutorial, I'll be using PowerPoint version 16.63.1 on macOS. If you've got a different operating system or a different version of the software, your results may be different. The template featured is the Snow PowerPoint template.
Let's get started with a multimedia presentation example:
The first thing we want to do is add images to the PowerPoint template. This section explains how to add still and animated images:
The simplest way to add an image to PowerPoint is to simply copy and paste. You can copy an image to your clipboard in practically any app like a web browser or image editor, and then right-click to paste it into PowerPoint.
A better way to insert images is to save them to your computer, then insert them using the Insert menu. Go to the Insert > Pictures menu to browse to an image to insert.
On the pop-up menu, browse to where your images are stored and click on them to add them to the presentation.
The reason that I prefer using the Insert menu is that you can add more than one image at the same time.
Hold the Control button on your keyboard and click on multiple images before you press Insert to add them all to a slide.
Once an image is on the slide, you can click and drag it to move it around on the slide. If the image is larger or smaller than you want, you can click and drag on the corner to resize it.
Here are the key Picture Tools to try out:
Check out this tutorial for a deep dive on working with images inside PowerPoint:
Once you've added your images to PowerPoint, it's time to add sound. This section explains how to use audio files in your multimedia presentation:
Audio is another multimedia type you can work with in PowerPoint.
If you've got an audio track on your computer like an MP3 or WAV file, you can easily add them to your presentation. Choose the Insert > Audio > Audio on My PC option to browse for and choose an audio file.
After you choose the audio file, you'll see a small speaker icon on your PowerPoint slide. You can hover over it and press the play button to play it while presenting.
If you don't already have your audio recorded in a file, you can actually capture it right inside of PowerPoint.
To record audio for the presentation, go to the Insert > Audio > Record Audio option.
Now, you'll see the Record Sound option pop up. Press the red Record button, and PowerPoint will start grabbing audio. When you're finished press the Stop button (black square) to add your audio to PowerPoint.
PowerPoint lets you make minor edits and adjustments to audio files without having to open another app. With the audio file selected, the most useful options are found on the Audio Tools > Playback menu.
Here are some of the most useful options:
Video is a powerful multimedia type you can use. PowerPoint supports adding video from your computer or online. Let's look at how to insert and change them:
If you've got a video clip on your computer, you can quickly drop it into your presentation by using the Insert menu. Go to Insert > Video > This Device to browse to your video file.
Once the video is on your slide, you can drag the corners to resize it and control how much of the slide it covers.
PowerPoint has good support for most of the major video file types, like MP4, QuickTime, and Windows Media files.
Learn more about how to add video into PowerPoint:
