Video: Insert a video from your PC

Watch this video to see how to insert or link to a video that is saved to your computer's local drive.

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Insert a video from your PC

You have a video file on your computer that you want to play in your presentation.

Here is how to insert it and select play settings.

There are a couple of ways to insert a video file depending on the slide layout.

First, we will insert a video in a content layout within a placeholder.

In the placeholder I'll click the insert video icon, then I will click Browse, select my video and click Insert.

The video is inserted within the placeholder.

It has a play bar attached and I can control the action by clicking Play and Pause.

Now let's go to slide three and compare a blank layout.

To insert a video here I click the INSERT tab, Video, Video on My PC.

I select the video and click Insert.

In a blank layout the video is inserted either in the middle of the slide or at full slide size.

Depending on the videos original format.

If you want to resize the video and keep it centered press and hold control point to a corner and drag the two-pointed cursor.

PowerPoint maintains the height to width proportions as you resize.

Now let's click Slide Show to play the video in slide show view.

In a slide show when I move the cursor the play bar appears.

I click Play to start the video and pause to pause it.

I can drag on the play bar to go forward in the action or back.

And, there is a volume control.

Note that I can also play the video by clicking it a hand cursor appears when I point.

And I can click to pause it too.

Back in normal view let's try another approach.

On this slide I've inserted the video, resized it and pulled it into a corner.

I want the video to start automatically and to appear full-screen only while it's playing.

I also want this text box to appear when the video stops.

To choose the settings I want I select the video and click the Video Tools PLAYBACK tab.

Then for the start setting I'll change On click to Automatically.

I'll also check Play Full Screen and Hide While Not Playing.

Now let's click the preceding slide and click slide show to see the sequence.

I click the slide before the video then the video plays automatically full screen.

When it's done it disappears and wee see only the text box that's on the video slide.

Finally, here is an important point about videos and file size.

When you click Insert to insert a video the video file is embedded in the presentation and that results in a large file size for the presentation.

To reduce file size, save the presentation and click the FILE tab on the Info tab under properties you will see the file size.

This file is over eight megabytes.

To make the file size smaller and more manageable for sharing click Compress Media and choose a type of compression in terms of quality.

Let's try Internet Quality.

The file gets compressed and the compressed media window shows the amount of space saved.

We will close this window.

When I save the file and then click File again I see under properties that the file size is smaller.

If I don't like the result of the compression I can click Compress Media Undo.

To avoid the issue of a large file size another option is to link to the video file.

To do that when you first insert the video click the arrow next to insert and click Link to File.

When you present you need to have access to the linked video file from the presenting computer.

For more information about this and for additional tips such as creating a trigger to play a video, see the course summary at the end of this course.

Up next, edit and format a video.