How to Add Audio to Google Slides, Power Point, or Keynote Presentations and Convert Them to Online Courses

How to add audio to Google Slides, Power Point, or Keynote presentations - intro

If you are a course creator, you probably know what slides are very useful, no matter if you are presenting live in front of the audience or when preparing the online course. Good presentation is a key thing that may make your training engaging, but it also can help you as a presenter to know what you want to talk about.

But what’s important in a good presentation is not to put everything you would like to say, just point the most important things you want to cover, present some image or graph to illustrate a concept.

That’s totally fine if you are presenting live, but how can you reuse your presentation when you’d like to record it and publish it as an online course or webinar?

No matter what kind of tool you are using to create your slides, if that’s PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, or maybe just a screen recording, you can record and add audion to each of them.

The most important thing when adding the voiceover to your slides is good audio quality. If you have ever watched the video, which has horrible audio, you probably know how difficult it’s to go through it.

While you provide a learning experience for people, it has to be understandable, so your students would like to listen to your videos and come back to you for more courses.

It’s worth investing in a microphone to provide good audio quality because using the one built into your laptop or mobile phone can destroy your students’ experience. It doesn’t have to be expensive, and you can find lots of good equipment on Amazon.

Well, microphones are not the main subject of this article, so let’s go to the point, which is how to add audio to Google Slides as first!

How to add audio to Google Slides?

Google Slides are really popular as a tool to create a presentation, which would be available in any place where you have access to the internet, so basically everywhere.

It works the same on every computer, and what’s better, you can do it for free, without buying Microsoft Office or having a MacBook. All you need to create Google Slides is a Google account.

The main question today is how to add audio to Google Slides. That’s pretty easy.

If you already have the audio that you’d like to add to your Google Slides presentation, place the file to your Google Drive, so you can locate it easily. Remember that Google Slides supports MP3 and WAV files only.

Next, open your presentation in Google Slides, go to the Insert menu in the top bar, and select Audio. You will see the window with files available in your Google Docs or shared with you recently.

Select the file which is the audio you want to add and click the Select button.

Next, you will see a rounded sound icon on the current slide, like in the image below.

To adjust your audio file, you have to go to the Format menu in the top bar and select the Format option.

It will open the window on the right side, where you can adjust settings like playing start, volume, or stopping the audion on the slide change. You can even change the color of the icon so it looks better with the colors for your slide show.

If you’d like to record the voice over your slides, unfortunately, Google Slides doesn’t have such a functionality. But you can really easily add the narration to Google Slides using the method presented above.

What if you use different tools to create your presentations? Let’s check how to do a voiceover on a PowerPoint presentation.

How to do voiceover on Power Point presentation?

PowerPoint is one of the most popular tools to create presentations. Since I remember, it was the first tool I learned in school to make stunning slide shows as a school project.

If you are a user of Microsoft Office, and PowerPoint is your main software to create slides, in this section, I’ll tell you step by step how to do a voiceover on Power Point presentation.

First, open your existing presentation in PowerPoint. When it’s on, search for the Insert option in the toolbar and select Audio.

There are two options you can choose between. If you have ready audio that you’d like to add, select Audio on My PC, but if you would like to start recording, it’s possible as well with the second option, Record Audio….

Keep in mind that PowerPoint may ask you for permissions to access the microphone on your computer, so no worries if any wired window will popup asking for permissions.

After selecting Record Audio, you’ll see a popup asking for the name for your file, so call it how you wish, and when you are ready to start recording, click the circle icon.

When you finished, press OK, and you’ll see the sound icon, and this will mean the voice was added to the slide, as simple as that!

It works the same on Windows and Mac, so no worries. But speaking about Mac, if you are creating your slide shows in Keynote, let’s check how you can add Audio using this software!

How to add audio to Keynote presentation?

Another tool used to create presentations, especially by MacBook users, is Keynote. It’s kind of the equivalent of PowerPoint for Mac. Keynote is a simple to use and intuitive tool, and similar to PowerPoint, it provides a possibility to record audio.

To add narration to your Keynote presentation, first, please open the file in Keynote. Next, you have two options to start recording.

You can look for the Insert option in the top bar, and there you can use Add Audio option. The next option is to find the Documents button on the top right corner of the app. Then you’ll see the right sidebar with two tabs. One is Document, and the other one is Audio. We will select the second one.

In the sidebar, you can add a ready file or start recording. When you are ready to start recording, press the Record button. Your presentation will open on a full screen. On the bottom, you’ll have controls for recording. To start and stop recording, press the red dot on the bottom.

If you’d like to record navigation to every slider, open Show Navigator on the top left. Then you can simply record one slide and continue on the next.

To be sure you are recording, pay attention to a bar on the top. While recording is on, it’s red, and when it’s off, it should be green.

When you are done with recording, press the red dot button to stop. Next, close the full screen and press Escape saving. Your recording will be visible and able to listen on the right sidebar.

To check the recording with the presentation, press Play Recorded Slideshow.

How to add audio to Google Slides, Power Point, or Keynote presentations - Summary

In this article, we went through adding audio to different slide shows created using different tools, like Google Slides, PowerPoint, or Keynote.

Not all of them allow you to record inside the software, but it’s not a problem because you are able to simply add an audio file and adjust the start.

No matter how you create your presentation, you can always use external tools to record the voice. If you are using MacBook, you can use QuickTime Player to record the audio and simply upload it to your presentation. It will also work if you have a screen recording instead of a presentation.

I hope you found this article useful, especially when creating your next online course or webinar. Your presentation will provide a great experience for your students, especially for those who are not visually focused. It can also help to make more engaging content.

Thank you for reading,
Anna from Duomly

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