So I’ve been looking into embedding video to PowerPoint presentations. On the surface, it seems easy to do. You simply click on the “Insert” tab in the menu bar and select video from your desktop or add the address of an online video. (Or when you are looking at the slide layout you can click on the video icon on the slide to add the video.)

My hiccup was that I wanted to include a video so that I could send the PPT to a colleague and they could view it without going online. So adding a link to a video was out. Adding from the desktop is easy enough, except when I tested only WMV and AVI files seemed to work for me. (YouTube files tend to be MP4 and the videos off my camera are MP4.)

So the next tricky part is turning MP4 into WMV or AVI files. So I found an online video converter: http://www.mediaconverter.org You can either upload your file to convert or point to a video on YouTube to convert. Once it’s converted, you can simply add to the PPT.

So this worked great. Now I had a PPT that showed a video on at least one slide.

The final issue is that the file you create with the videos tends to get very big – so big my email package wouldn’t send. I was able to get around this last hurdle by uploading the PPT (up to 100MB) to SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net. The video didn’t show on the site – but when I downloaded it from the site to my desktop the videos were visible.

I know that’s kind of specific today but I hope that will help someone out.