Careful use of sound and music can be very effective in keeping an audience engaged.
PowerPoint enables you to attach sound - either music or narration - to a presentation using a variety of sound formats.
Photo credit: Jake Levin
Of course, you must have a sound card on your computer, and on all of the computers that play your presentation, that can handle sound and play it at the quality you want.
If you plan to record narration, you also need a microphone for your computer.
To get the best narration, do not use the built-in microphone, but get a high-quality microphone that plugs in to the microphone outlet and is designed to help filter out ambient noise.
The use of sound and narration puts a heavy load on a computer.
To maximize the quality of the sound of your presentation, follow these guidelines.
- Use the highest quality sound card you can afford. The more you use sound, the better your sound card should be.
- Have as much memory as possible. Sound that can be cached in memory will always play more smoothly.
- Optimize the sound files you want to use before you put them into PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not an audio editor.
- Keep your hard drive in top shape by running Disk Cleanup regularly and by running Disk Defragmenter when needed.
- Run the show several times the day of the presentation to get as much of it as possible cached in memory.
Sounds plays more smoothly and with faster response time when it is cached.
- Close down all unnecessary applications when running a presentation.
Read the related articles below for more information about audio in PowerPoint.
