E-mail this pagePowerPoint: Adding a Narration
There are circumstances in which it can be to your advantage to record a narration directly onto your PowerPoint presentation. In those instances where you wish to make an entire presentation available to your audience and you don't want to have to be there to present it, the Record Narration option lets you record your entire presentation for playback on a stand-alone computer--on a student's desktop, in a lab environment, at a kiosk--where PowerPoint is also installed, and where speakers or a headset are available.
Tip: Save your presentation under a new name before beginning to experiment with the Record Narration function(s). If you later decide that you do not want the narration after you've applied it, you'll find it easier to open a previously saved audio-free copy than to remove the audio and timing settings from the narrated version.
The process of recording a narration is simple: from the main PowerPoint menu, select Slide Show|Record Narration .
A Record Narration dialog will appear.
In the Record Narration dialog, you have the option to adjust input levels and recording quality or simply to click on the OK button and get started. It is usually a good idea to click the Set Microphone Level... button to make sure that the recording levels will give you a good quality recording.
Upon clicking the Set Microphone Level... button, a Microphone Check dialog will appear, as illustrated below.
Follow the instructions, reading the text into your microphone. As you do so, the the slider (under the meter bar) will move to the right (to increase the recording level) or to the left (to decrease the recording level). By the time you have finished reading, the recording level should be optimally set. Clicking the OK button will subsequently close the Microphone Check dialog.
When you are again looking at the Record Narration dialog, a click of the OK button, will immediately begin the recording process, so make sure that you are ready to start adding the narration to your presentation. When your first slide appears on the screen, the recording is underway.
From this point, you can give the presentation as you would if you were standing before a room of people; as you make your way through the slides, the "timings" of your key-presses are linked to the audio track so that, when you've finished, your presentation is ready to be canned and delivered pretty much without you.
If you wish to pause your narration at some point during the recording, right-click on a slide to introduce the following context menu:
Then click on the Pause Narration option. To begin recording again, right-click on the slide again, and select the Resume Narration option (not illustrated here).
After you reach the last slide, you'll see a prompt asking whether you'd like to save the timings; if you're happy with the narration, click Yes ; otherwise, click No , and start the process again from the beginning.
Once the presentation has been saved with its timings, the entire presentation will play on its own, with your narration guiding the audience and the slides advancing at the appropriate moments, in sync with your voice.
Tip: If you want to re-record a narration that has already been added to a slide, view the slide in PowerPoint's Normal View, and then select Slide Show|Record Narration from the main PowerPoint menu. You will then be able to record your narration as you did before. When you have finished re-recording the slide, advance to the next slide and then press ESC to stop the recording.