X
Business

Best Practices for Playing and Controlling More in PowerPoint Presentations

You ever want to insert, control and play Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash movies, PDF documents or anything in PowerPoint to enhance your excellent presentations. Here you get the chance.
Written by W.Peterson , Contributor

You ever want to insert, control and play Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Flash movies, PDF documents or anything in PowerPoint to enhance your excellent presentations. Here you get the chance.

As we've already known, Microsoft PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful and popular tool for helping anyone create and conduct rich presentations. PowerPoint even allows you to integrate rich media, video and documents into the slides.

To insert Word, Excel and PDF files, you must have Microsoft Word, Excel and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed in your computer, and go to PowerPoint menus: Insert -> Object, then you can insert these files as objects into your presentation.

Insert Object in Office 2007

If you use ActiveX controls in PowerPoint, which can be as simple as a text box, as complex as an entire dialog, and in some cases as complex as a small application, you can insert and control more such as Flash movies as you want. Click the More Controls tool More Controls in the toolbox (you need to Show Developer tab in the Ribbon at PowerPoint Options -> Popular -> Top options for working with PowerPoint), and then click the control you want in the list (e.g. Shockwave Flash Object). Just place and resize the control in the slide as you like.

More Conbtrols in PowerPoint 2007

To make full use of the control, you have to set the properties. Make sure the control is selected, and then click Properties Properties on the toolbar. Complete the source path to link your Flash movie or other files to the controls, and now you get ready to play it as well.

Flash Object Properties

Certainly a good presentation cannot depend on text and pictures only, try to grab more items to power up your presentations in PowerPoint.

William Peterson Presentation Veteran

Editorial standards