hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can add a voice over to a microsoft powerpoint presentation now one of my pet peeves is you get a powerpoint presentation deck and you just wish that the person who pulled together the presentation could walk you through it well now when you add a voiceover you can have that person walk you through the deck even if they’re not there i’m going to show you three different methods for adding a voiceover first i’m going to show you what i like to call the simple technique you could simply insert some audio then i’ll show you how you can do it when recording a slideshow you could also include things like annotations or video and third i’ll show you how you can add audio using an app outside of powerpoint that’s free and then you can import it in this allows you to go in you could edit your audio you can make sure it’s perfect before putting it into your slide presentation as always you can use the timestamps down below in the description if you want to jump around all right well let’s jump in there are a few different ways that i could insert a voiceover in powerpoint up here i can click on the insert tab up on the ribbon and over on the far right hand side i can insert audio also i can click on slideshow and i could record a slideshow to insert audio as well however all these different tools are spread throughout all these different tabs and it takes a little bit of time to find them instead first i want to show you how you can bring all of your recording tools together into one place with the ribbon open here on top let’s right click on the ribbon and we can now customize the ribbon let’s click on that this opens up powerpoint options and here i can customize the ribbon over on the right hand side you’ll see all these different items that appear on the ribbon if there’s a checkbox with a check mark in it that means that the item’s currently on the ribbon anything with an empty box means that it’s not showing up on the ribbon today if we scroll down just a little bit you’ll see an option for recording let’s check that box and then click on ok this inserts a new tab up on our ribbon for recording and here we have all of our recording tools in one place this is going to make it a lot easier to add a voice over to your presentation now that we have access to all of our recording tools let’s use the first method or the simple method to include a voiceover over on the left hand side choose the slide where you would like to include a voiceover and here on side three all i say is join a high performing team but i think i could also include a voiceover just to make it clear why that is to include a voiceover on this slide let’s go up to the recording tab and there’s an option to insert audio when we click on this you’ll see a menu with two different options you can include audio from your pc so basically pre-recorded audio or you could record sound directly from here let’s click on record sound this opens up a record sound prompt down below and it’s pretty simple here we can give a name for our recording i’m just going to leave it set to the default and then after that we really have two different options we can kick off the recording or we could cancel now i came here to record so let’s kick off a recording by clicking on the record button the kevin cookie company has one of the highest performing teams in the industry in fact when you look at employees who joined over the past week our employee retention is a hundred percent once i’m all done i simply click on the stop button and then i can click on the play icon if i want to listen to the recording again or if i want to take maybe a second take i could record again and that’ll wipe out my existing recording and then i could re-record once i’m all done let’s click on ok congratulations we have now finished our first voiceover you’ll notice that there’s an icon on the slide with a speaker and when we hover over that you see different playback controls here i can play the recording the kevin cookie comes i could also move back and i can move forward in the recording and over here i can also adjust the volume when i have the icon selected you’ll also notice that we have two additional tabs on top of the ribbon first let’s click into audio format and with audio format we can use all of these tools up here to change what this icon looks like in fact we could even change the icon to something else by clicking on this menu now here i can click on different picture styles let’s say i want to add a black background behind this i can do that to make it stand out a little bit more next let’s click into the tab that says playback to see what we can do here this has a whole bunch of different playback tools for this audio over on the far left hand side we can play the audio if we want to hear what it sounds like over here we can also add a bookmark you might be wondering what is a bookmark well here if i let’s say i jump forward maybe about halfway through my audio maybe i’m making a really good point you can add a bookmark in so you could very quickly get back to that point up above i also have the option to trim my audio so when i click on this i can set the beginning point so maybe i take a few seconds before i start talking i can trim that out of the track here at the end too it looks like there’s a little bit of downtime at the end where i’m not speaking so i can also trim the end of it one tool that’s missing here is you don’t have the ability to split the clip and you don’t have the ability to cut out pieces in the middle later on in this tutorial i’ll show you a way you can do that using an app outside of powerpoint for now let’s click on ok backup on the playback ribbon you can also have it fade in you could have it fade out you could also adjust the volume of the clip and over here we have a few different controls that affect the playback i can have it play in the click sequence so when someone lands on this slide once they click then the audio will automatically start playing also there’s another option for just automatically what this means is when someone lands on this slide the audio will just play on its own down below there’s also the option when clicked on when someone lands on this slide to listen to the voiceover they have to actually come over here and click on this icon or click on the play icon to listen to the voiceover now that we’ve looked at the simple method for including a voiceover next i want to show you how you can record a slideshow as another approach for including a voiceover once again let’s go up to the top ribbon and let’s click into recording over on the far left hand side there’s the option to record a slideshow when we click on this we can start recording from the current slide so here i’m on slide three or i could record from the very beginning back on slide one i want to record from the beginning so let’s click on this option this opens up the powerpoint record slideshow view and this takes over our entire screen and there’s quite a bit of functionality here so let’s take a quick look at what we can do compared to the simple approach we can do quite a bit more up in the top left hand corner we can kick off our recording by clicking on the prominent red button we can also stop the recording and we can listen to it again to make sure that we’re satisfied with it over in the center you also have the option to look at all of your slide notes when i click on this this will show me my notes and i could expand the font size or i could reduce the size again to the right of that there’s an icon that says clear if i’ve done any recordings in my deck i can simply clear out all of those recordings i haven’t done any yet so there’s nothing to clear also i have a settings menu over here here i could choose my microphone and a new addition now i could also choose a camera if i want to have a video go along with my voiceover one of the neat things about using the record slideshow view is you also have access to all of these different annotation tools here for example i could use a laser pointer to point things out on the slide or i could circle things like this really is a great place to work so i want to make sure i underline that the neat thing too is as you’re doing your voiceover all of your different annotations will be synced with your voiceover down in the bottom right hand corner i can also toggle my microphone off or i could turn it back on and i could also turn my video on or off hey now you can all see me down here i could also turn the camera preview off or on depending on what i want for now i just want to do a voiceover so i’ll turn the video off now that we’ve looked at all of the functionality here why don’t we try kicking off a recording up in the top left hand corner let’s click on record we’re going to see a countdown timer to the beginning of the recording hello employees of the kevin cookie company today we are going to run through our benefits handbook and i’m sure all of you already know that this is a great place to work at but just to remind all of you you get free cookies why would you ever want to work anywhere else now one of the great things about using this recording mode for voiceover is you can pause a recording so maybe i want to collect my thoughts think about what i want to say next and once i’m ready to go i can click on record again and this once again resumes the recording now once i’m all done i can click on the stop icon and now i could replay it to listen to it again or maybe i’m unsatisfied with it if i want to re-record i can go over to clear once again and i can clear the recording on the current slide also if i go over and if i click on the record icon again this will overwrite the recording that i just did so i could simply record again and maybe my next take is better in which case i can keep the new one once i’m satisfied with my recording i can simply click on this icon over on the right hand side to advance to the next slide here again i could start recording a voice over just for this slide now one of the things you might notice is i can continue advancing through the slides even when a recording is in progress now right now it’s recording on this slide when i advance to the next slide the recording on the previous slide stopped and now it’s kicked off a new recording for this slide so the one thing you want to watch out for is if you’re talking and then you advance to the next slide you want to make sure you take a break before you advance to the next slide otherwise your speech might get cut off i’ve now exited the record slide show view and in the bottom right hand corner now you’ll see that every slide has its own audio icon so here i could play back the audio by clicking on this now each slide has its own so each slide is independent from the other slides the great thing about this is if i want to move slides around or if i want to rearrange things i could simply take this slide move it around and this audio is associated with this slide so i don’t have to go back and re-record everything if i just happen to move some slides around the nice thing too is i don’t have to record everything in just one session instead i could go through the first two slides i could record all of my voice over then i could take a break and i could come back later and resume on slide three now let’s say i go back and i listen to one of my audio recordings and i’m not really satisfied i can go back and once again i can redo it very easily i can go right back on top and i could record from the current slide i could record this slide and then exit and that’ll only update the audio recording on this one individual slide now one more thing to call out about the record slideshow view if we click over to the tab that says slideshow you’ll notice these different checkboxes by default it’ll use the timings of your recording so if you spent 20 seconds on the slide while you were narrating it it’ll stay on that slide for 20 seconds and it’ll automatically advance also it’s currently set to automatically play narrations so you can go through and you can update this to match whatever your needs are powerpoint offers some incredibly rich voice over tools however sometimes you just might want even more control let’s say for example that you’re narrating you’re doing a voiceover and maybe uh you know you include a lot of um’s that you want to cut out you can use a third-party tool called audacity to remove those and then you can import it back into powerpoint let’s jump over to our web browser audacity is an incredibly powerful audio recorder and editor and best of all it’s entirely free to get to get audacity head to the website audacityteam.org and on the website click on download and then run through the install process once you finish downloading audacity go ahead and launch the application and you’ll see an interface that looks like this now once again audacity is an incredibly powerful audio editor and you can do a lot with it today i’m just going to show you some of the basics of how you can record make a few simple edits and then import that into powerpoint up on the top bar you can choose the microphone that you want to use once you have your microphone selected you can click on this red icon to kick off a recording welcome to the kevin cookie company benefits handbook we’re going to talk about all the great benefits we offer here once i’m done with my recording i’ll click on the stop button i’ve now finished my recording and here i can see waveforms that match with everything that i said at the very beginning it takes me a little bit of time before i start speaking here i could select that and i could delete that portion let’s go and listen and see if there are any other edits we need to make welcome to the kevin cookie company benefits handbook uh one thing you’ll notice right in the middle of my recording i stutter and i say um and that doesn’t really sound good in a voiceover i can highlight this portion of the clip and i’ll press the delete key on my keyboard to remove it that gets rid of it now you’ll notice that my sentence flows a lot better if it’s handbook we’re going to talk about all the great benefits we offer here once i’m done with my recording and then here you notice that i talk about stopping the recording so i’ll also cut off the end portion of this now this is a perfect clip i’ve gone through i’ve removed some sections in the middle and now i’m ready to get it into powerpoint to get it into powerpoint let’s go to the file menu and here i can click on export and i can export it as an mp3 as a wave powerpoint will accept either one of those formats i’m going to export as an mp3 i’m going to title my file intro and i’ll simply save it to my desktop and then click on save back within powerpoint i can now insert my recording from audacity up here i can click on audio and let’s insert audio on my pc when i click on this this opens up my file picker and here i see my file on my desktop i’ll simply click on that and then click on insert i’ve now inserted my audio and let’s listen welcome to the kevin cookie company benefits handbook we’re gonna talk about so there you notice that my audio plays back perfectly and it keeps all of the edits that i made within audacity once i’m all done inserting all of my voiceovers the next question then is well how do i want to distribute this out to people i could simply save it as a powerpoint presentation and then i could send it out and people can open it and launch it into slideshow mode however let’s go back to the recording tab to see what other richness is there when i click on recording not only can i insert recordings but it also helps me prep the presentation for distribution here for example i can save it as a show so when i save it as a show when people click on it it’ll automatically launch into slideshow mode also i could also click to export to video so this way it’ll be an mp4 file that people can click on and this will automatically play the slides along with my voiceover all right if you now know how to include a voiceover in your powerpoint presentation please give this video a thumbs up to see future videos like this make sure to hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a note down below alright well that’s all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you