Inserting an Online Video into PowerPoint
This tutorial seeks to teach PowerPoint users, specifically incoming college freshmen, how to insert a YouTube video into their presentation. This is a handy tool for students to know as PowerPoint presentations now extend beyond walls of text. In an age where almost everything is connected digitally, it is important to enhance learning through multimedia content like an educational video. Properly linking videos to a PowerPoint presentation also prevents tech catastrophes when presenting the PPT to a class. An improperly linked video can not only be an embarrassment, it can be the difference in a letter grade or winning a client after college.
Objectives
By the end of this tutorial, you should:
Determine the slide where the video will be inserted
The first thing to do is determine where a video would enhance learning in your PowerPoint. The PPT pictured below in Figure 1 just featured a slide on conducting a reference interview. So, providing a video of a properly conducted reference interview will help drive the message home to the audience.
Find the YouTube video to use in the PowerPoint
Got a particular video in mind that will go great with your presentation? Locate it on YouTube so you can copy the URL as pictured below in Figure 2.
Locate the “Insert Video” button
Click on the “Insert” tab in the ribbon. The “Insert Video” button is found within the red box in Figure 3 below. Keep in mind the button simply says “Video” beneath the picture of a strip of film, not “Insert Video” until you hover over it with your mouse.
Apply the link
Click the “Insert Video” button to bring up two options in a drop down menu. Choose the top choice, “Online Video,” highlighted in gray, below in Figure 4.
Then, insert the copied URL into the top box for YouTube videos, as pictured below in Figure 5.
Next, hit enter on your keyboard for the final step of linking your video to the PPT.
Apply the link, continued
After hitting enter, a box appears which contains a thumbnail of the video being inserted. Click on the video thumbnail, circled in yellow below in Figure 6. Finally, select the “Insert” button boxed in red.
Now, you have a slide with your video properly linked! But we aren’t finished yet…
Reposition and resize the video
Let’s move the video over to the right side of the slide, into the white portion, by manually dragging it. To do this, click on the video and hover your cursor along the edge of the video until a compass-like arrow appears as in Figure 8.
After moving the video to the desired location, resize manually by again selecting the video (unless it is still selected), and grabbing one of the corners and dragging to desired size, larger or smaller. Reposition again if necessary. Figure 9 below is how my slide looks after resizing and repositioning the video.
Playing the video
There are two ways to play the video:
The first way is to double-click the video if you’re still editing the slides. This will cause the play button to appear on the video, as seen in Figure 10. Simply click it, and the video begins.
Playing the video, continued
The second way to play the video is from within the slideshow. When you arrive at the slide with the video, the play button will be present and you can click it, as shown in Figure 11. There are some other advanced PPT features that allow the video to play automatically, but those features are not covered in this presentation.
Conclusion
Whether it’s for a school project or a work report once you’re a professional, you will soon find yourself using Microsoft PowerPoint or a similar program. When creating slide presentations, it is important to know how to properly insert videos into your presentations. Incorporating video is a great way to engage people with different learning styles, to provide context to a lesson, as a way to offer examples of how to achieve certain goals, as with the reference interview, and many other things. More often than not, people turn to videos to learn a new task before consulting a manual or written directions, so we would be smart to embrace this trend.
I hope that by helping you navigate the PPT to a place where videos enhance learning, guiding you to YouTube and selecting an appropriate video, locating the “Insert Video” button on PPT, applying the link to the appropriate location in your PPT, then showing you how to resize and reposition the video, that you now know how to insert videos and play them in PPT.
