Exploring Clip Art, Pictures, Movies, and Sound
Clip art, pictures, movies, and sounds can add pizzazz and polish to your PowerPoint presentations, creating a full multimedia effect. You can insert picture, sound, or video clips from a variety of sources—clips from the Microsoft Clip Organizer, clips you download from the Microsoft Web site, or your own pictures, sounds, and videos.
Understanding Clip Art
Office XP offers thousands of clip art images that you can use to enliven your presentations. Microsoft's Web site includes even more images. After you insert clip art into your presentation, you can reformat, recolor, and redesign it to suit your needs.
Office XP includes clip art images in the following formats:
Windows Metafile (WMF)
Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM)
Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)
Joint Photographic Experts Groups (JPEG)
You can also add images in the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) and Bitmap (BMP) formats.
Understanding Pictures
Pictures are similar to clip art. In PowerPoint, pictures refer to images you insert from your own files, or scan in through a scanner or digital camera. They can be drawn images or actual photographs.
Understanding Sound and Video Files
PowerPoint includes the capability to insert media clips (sound and video files) into your presentations. To use these features, you need to have a sound card, microphone, and speakers installed on your computer.
Media clips work in much the same way as clip art illustrations and photographs, and are also available through the Microsoft Clip Organizer. Common media clip file formats include the following:
GIF Graphical Interchange Format. Animated GIFs (a series of GIF images that appear animated) are stored with other video files.
Media clips can greatly enhance the multimedia effect of your presentation, but remember that, as with clip art and other images, overuse of media clips can clutter a presentation.
→ To learn more about ways to include multimedia content in your presentations, see “Incorporating Multimedia” in Chapter 26, “Exploring Technicalities and Techniques.”
A PowerPoint presentation can play a clip automatically during a slideshow, or you can customize the clip to play only by a mouse action. Other multimedia options include recording your own sounds, or playing a CD track as a slideshow background.