Help me fix a Power Point presentation? (need answer fast)

Factual Questions
1

Hi All,

I’m creating a Power Point presentation which is essentially a slide show of pictures. I would like to embed two songs to play across the show.

Alternatively, I can save the Power Point as a movie and add a sound track.

I am using Power Point 2008 for a Mac.

Issue is - when I embed the songs in the slide show if I select for them to play automatically, they play fine but the slides don’t advance. If I select for them to play across slides, the slides advance but the songs ‘hicup’ as they’re playing. They ‘hicup’ a LOT.

How do I fix that?

Alternatively, I can save the Power Point as a movie and add a sound track but…I don’t know how to make a sound track - I don’t even know what software I would need to use. I’ve purchased the songs I need from iTunes and they are currently that format of file. I managed to imbed one into the movie as an iTunes file but the movie started and the song quit playing 4 or 5 seconds in.

Any ideas? Thoughts? Have you had this problem? Were you able to fix it?

I’m quite limited in the amount of hardware I can use to carry this off so suggesting that I play the songs on a separate machine as the slide show/move goes isn’t super helpful.

Thanks in advance!

2

I don’t know about PowerPoint 2008 on a Mac, but I’ve run into a similar situation with an older version of PowerPoint on a Windows box several years ago. I was trying to time the pictures and the music exactly, but the timing kept getting thrown off due to how long it took to load the pictures into memory. This may or may not work for you, but I found that the second time the presentation played, the pictures were already loaded in memory and the timing synched up perfectly. The tricky part was having enough time to play the presentation one time through (without showing it on the screen) so that when I played it “for real”, it was ready to go.

I never really had the time to go back and figure out if there was a better way. If I recall correctly, I tried both linking the pictures and embedding the pictures, but my memory may be fuzzy on that.

Alternatively, another thing that might work is to just play the music and advance your slides manually. I’ve done that on a few musical productions for church presentations in the past.

I have also used a movie maker program (specifically, Windows Movie Maker), and I’m pretty sure the Mac has a cheap/free program. Are you comfortable doing a movie on the Mac?

I’ve used Final Cut Pro on a Mac (but that is not a cheap tool). The basic idea is that you put the audio into the Audio track and the slide pictures into the Video track.

I’ve never tried to save the PowerPoint as a movie, so I’m not sure what happened when you tried it.

Hope that gives you something to go on.

3

What machine are you doing this on? it sounds like the computer is under-powered.

4

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac9,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: IM91.008D.B08
SMC Version (system): 1.44f0

5

I would just go to iMovie and make the movie there. iPhoto may even be able to do it- not the exporting as a movie, but you can choose a playlist (made in iTunes) to use as the background music when you play the slideshow. iPhoto would be the easiest way to do it, but if you need to record it, iMovie can do it but there is the extra step of adding the photos and choosing a length of time for each. You can probably just grab all of them and drop them in, but I have never done it that way.

6

Seeing as I would use Windows Movie Maker to accomplish this on a PC, I recommend using iMovie on a Mac. The other way would be to google for a DVD slideshow maker.

It does seem really silly that I can listen to music while looking at pictures, without any hiccups, but PowerPoint can’t handle it. It sounds like a deficiency of PowerPoint.