PowerPoint Tip: Secrets to Successfully Narrating a Presentation

When you add narration to a presentation, especially with slide timings, you create a self-running presentation. It’s almost a video effect. Such a presentation is great to send to potential customers on a CD, post on your website or presentation-sharing site, or display at a trade show or in your company lobby.

I generally prefer to record my voice with Audacity, a free sound recorder and editor. If you download it, be sure to also read the instructions and download the LAME MP3 encoder, which allows you to save files in MP3 format. The advantage is that it’s easier to edit the files, in case you tend to stumble over your own language, as I do!

However, I recently wanted to post a narrated presentation on authorSTREAM.com. This slide sharing site has some nice benefits:

* You can upload presentations with embedded sound

* Play many animations

* You can convert presentations under 5 minutes into video for free, for posting on video sharing sites (like YouTube) or on your own site.

But the sound must be embedded, which means using the narration feature (or tricking MP3s into making PowerPoint think they’re WAV files, because PowerPoint can only embed WAV files).

** Get the best sound quality

So I tried the narration feature and found that the quality was horrible. There was a lot of background noise. When I tried to use the same equipment in Audacity, the sound was fine. That’s when I discovered the first secret: CD quality.

To start the narration, go to the Slide Show tab and click Record Narration (in 2002/2003 choose Slide Show > Record Narration). Click the Set Microphone Level button to configure and test your audio settings.

Then be sure to click the Change Quality button! You have to do this every time; you cannot change the default value.

Change the quality when you narrate

Then, in the Sound Selection dialog, choose CD Quality from the Name drop-down list and click OK twice to start narrating.

Use CD quality for your narration

You then go to Slideshow view automatically. Narrate the presentation, clicking to move from one slide to another. At the end, you will be asked if you want to save the times of the slides. Do this to set the timings of each slide to match the narration.

** Edit narration successfully

If you make a mistake, you can narrate a slide again. Go to the slide, reopen the Record Narration dialog, and start over. Record the narration for that slide, and then press Esc. Be careful not to go to the next slide.

However, if your new narration is longer than the original, you may be running into a recognized problem: truncated narrations. This can be very frustrating. Apparently it happens because PowerPoint saves narration times separately from slide times. Even if you increase the slide time, PowerPoint will truncate the narration!

I’m going to tell you what Microsoft says to do and then I’ll tell you what worked for me.

Microsoft’s instructions are:

1. Make sure all animations are set to advance on a mouse click and not automatically.

2. If the last element to be animated on the slide is a text frame on an AutoShape that contains text, create a new shape and position it outside of the slide area. Set the shape’s Custom Animation setting to Appear. Make sure the shape is the last element to animate and that it is set to animated on mouse click.

3. Make sure slide transitions are set to advance on a mouse click and not automatically.

4. Record the narration again, and click No when asked if you want to save slide timings.

5. Preview the presentation in Slideshow view manually and check the narrations.

6. Then add automatic slide timings and animations.

No matter what I did, my new narration was cut. I made it shorter than the original and it was still cut off the same amount. Finally, I realized that the problem was not the length. PowerPoint was cutting off a certain amount no matter the length. So, I recorded a period of silence at the end of a narration. Then when PowerPoint cut it off, it was fine!