Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

Are My Sounds Linked or Embedded?
If you have in serted a sound and it is embedded, you do not need to worry
about where the sound file is. If it is linked, you do need to worry about it. While
knowing the size of the sound, the size of your setting for “Link sounds with file
size greater than,” and the type of sound will help you predict whether the sound
will be linked or embedded, you will want to check to be sure.
Once you have inserted a sound, click on the sound icon and choose “Sound
Ob ject” from the Edit menu. At the bot tom of the di alog box, you will see “File:”
and either “[Con tained in pre sen ta tion]” or a path to the file. The former in di-
cates an em bedded file, and the lat ter indicates a linked file. While the path to the 
file might help you lo cate the file (so you can copy it to your project folder), the
dialog box is generally too small to show the entire path.
Hy per text Links
Before version 97, PowerPoint was simply a tool to present material. Pre-
senters would stand up in front of an au dience and go through slide after slide.
PowerPoint’s ad vantage was that media (text, graphics, sounds, vid eos, etc.)
could be in corporated into the pre sentation to add bells and whistles and to pres-
ent in formation in a va riety of formats. PowerPoint 97 changed all that. OK,
PowerPoint 97 changed very lit 
tle of that because most peo 
ple still use
PowerPoint for lin ear pre sentations. How ever, PowerPoint 97 allows you to use
it in different ways.
One tool that was added to PowerPoint was hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow
you to create pre sentations that are non linear. With the pop ularity of the World
Wide Web, ev 
eryone is used to clicking on text to jump somewhere, and
PowerPoint gives you that capability. You can create hy pertext links to other
places in your presentation, to Web pages, and to other files.