Adding Sound to A PowerPoint Slide

Since most computers today come with a sound card and speakers, adding music and sound effects to a presentation is a great way to make it more interesting. PowerPoint comes with a small library of sound files—such as drums rolling, phones ringing, and roosters crowing—that you can incorporate into your presentations.

If you can’t find the sound you’re looking for, you can also insert sounds from external files. There are literally millions of sound files available on the Internet, if you know where to look. You can record your own accompaniment to slides. You can even have PowerPoint accompany your slides with songs from your favorite audio CDs.

View a demo on adding sound in PowerPoint

There are two basic types of sound files you can use in your presentations:

WAV Files: Contain digital records of real sounds, such as a dog barking.” WAV files have a .WAV file extension.
MIDI Files: Pronounced “Mid-ee” these files contain music that your sound card’s musical synthesizer can play. The quality of the music depends on how good your computer’s sound is. MIDI files have a .MID file extension.

To insert a sound file onto a slide

Open a PowerPoint presentation and select a slide.
Select Insert - Movies and Sounds - Sound from File from the menu.
The Insert dialog box appears. Select the sound file you want to use and click OK.
Click Yes in the dialog box that appears. PowerPoint adds the sound to the current slide, as indicated by the icon. When your presentation runs, this sound file will play automatically.
Double-click the icon to hear the sound.

Add songs from your favorite audio CDs to your slides

Insert the audio CD that contains the song or track you want to play into your computer’s CD-ROM drive. Note: This audio CD will need to be in your computer’s CD-ROM drive each time you want to present the slide show.
Select Insert - Movies and Sounds - Play CD Audio Track from the menu.
The Play Options dialog box appears. Select the Starting and Ending track in the appropriate boxes and click OK.
You’ll need the CD song list in order to provide PowerPoint with the track(s) that you want to play.

To insert a sound from the MS Clip Gallery

PowerPoint ships with a variety of sounds that you can use with your presentations. To access these files:

Select Insert - Movies and Sounds - Sound from Gallery from the menu
Select the sound you wish to use
Click OK

To add voice narration to a slide

Select Slide Show - Record Narration from the menu.
Click the Change Quality button (optional) and specify the recording quality (note that higher quality = bigger files). Click OK when you are finished.
Click OK, click the button, and record your narration as you advance through the slides. Click the button when you’ve finished recording.
Specify if you want to save the slide timings with the narration (usually you will want to answer Yes), and if you want to watch the narrated presentation.
Note: Another option to add narration and/or video to a presentation is to use the free Microsoft Producer program.

To play a sound file

Double-click the icon if you’re in Slide view.
If you’re in Slide Show view single-click the icon.

To delete a sound file

Click the sound file’s icon to select it and press the <Delete> key.