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

Figure 2.6. Re cord Sound Di alog Box
Sounds 19

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Link ing and Em bed ding Sounds
When you in clude some el ements in PowerPoint, they are em bedded in your
PowerPoint presentation. That means that the el 
ement be 
comes part of the
PowerPoint file. Other el ements are in serted as links to other files. Pic tures are
generally embedded in the pre sentation. Mov ies are links to other files. This
means that if you in sert a picture into a PowerPoint pre sentation, you no lon ger
need the orig inal picture. The PowerPoint pre sentation has the picture inside it, so
you can move the pre sentation to another disk or delete the original picture, and
the presentation will still show the pic ture. If you in sert a movie into a PowerPoint
presentation, the movie is not part of the PowerPoint file. The PowerPoint pre sen-
tation con tains a pointer to the file. If you move the PowerPoint presentation to
another disk or de lete the original movie, your pre sentation will no lon ger play
the movie.
Sometimes sounds are em bedded, and sometimes they are linked. Two
things affect whether they are embedded or linked: the type of sound and the size
of the sound. Sounds of type Audio For mat (.au), Au dio In terchange File For mat
(.aif or .aiff), and Musical In strument Dig ital In terface (.midi or .mid) are al ways
linked. Sounds of type Waveform Au dio (.wav) can be linked or embedded de -
pending on the size of the sound. Waveform Au dio sounds that are greater than
the size of the “Link sounds with file size greater than” set ting will be linked.
Waveform Au dio sounds that are smaller than that setting are embedded. You
can change this setting by go ing to the “Gen eral” tab of your “Pref er ences” or
“Op tions” (the place you made many of the changes to settings in the “Be fore
You Begin” section of this chapter). Look for the num ber next to “Link sounds
with file size greater than.” This number is in ki lobytes and usu ally starts at 100.
Most clip sounds (such as boings and beeps and ap plause) are far less than
100kB, but lon ger sounds can be larger. I gen erally set this setting to 999kB to
ensure that most of the sounds I use will be embedded.
In the “Before You Be gin” section of this chapter, I sug gested that you cre-
ate a folder for your PowerPoint pro ject and save your pre sentation there before
you do any thing. This is to pre vent prob lems with linked files. It is fine to have
linked files in your PowerPoint pre sentation, whether they are sounds or mov ies
or other files. The key is to make sure that the links work when you move your
presentation to another disk or another computer. If you have saved your
PowerPoint presentation to a folder, and you have saved any linked files to that
same folder be fore linking to those files, your pre sentation should be por table as
long as you move all the files to gether (i.e., move the whole folder).
Linked files be come a particular problem with sounds or movies taken
from the Clip Or ga nizer. On dif fer ent com put ers with dif fer ent op er at ing sys-
tems (even dif ferent versions of Win dows), even the standard clip sounds can be
lo cated in dif fer ent lo ca tions. In ad di tion, dif fer ent com put ers have dif fer ent clip
sounds loaded on them. If you in sert a sound from the Clip Organizer and the
20 Tra di tional Mul ti me dia Fea tures of PowerPoint

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sound is linked, there is a good chance that the sound will not play on other com-
puters. To alleviate this, you should find out where the sound is lo cated on your
computer and copy the sound you in tend to use into your folder with the presen-
tation. On my Win dows computer, many of the standard clip sounds can be
found in the folder: “C:\Pro 
gram Files\Microsoft Of 
fice\me 
dia\CntCD1\
Sounds,” but that is un likely to be where they are on your com puter. On my
Macintosh, the standard clip sounds can be found in “Macintosh HD:Ap pli ca-
tions:Microsoft Office X:Office:Sounds.”