Playing Music Continuously in a Web-Based Presentation

You can play music continuously during a presentation that you have posted to a Web site. The effect is quite striking. Because you usually are not narrating, the music doesn’t interfere, as it would if you were delivering a presentation live. Here’s the technique:

Choose File>Save as Web Page. In the Save as Type drop-down list, make sure that the type is Web Page (*.htm; *.html), not Single File Web Page.
Click Publish. Click Web Options and choose the settings that you want.
Click Publish again to publish the presentation.
Find the frame.htm file in the folder that contains all the presentation files. Shift+right-click and choose Open With to open it with Notepad. You’ll see the HTML code for the file.
After the <html> tag but before the <head> tag, add the following. Within the quotes, put the name of the music file you want to use. I’ve successfully tried MID, MP3, and WMA files.

Save the file and close Notepad.
Copy the music file to the same folder as the presentation. The folder is called [filename]_files.
Open frame.htm in Internet Explorer and the music should play and loop continuously.
Upload the files to your Web site!

To see an example in action go to my Quarterly Sales Report sample presentation. The music takes 36 seconds to complete one run-through and the presentation is only 4 slides long, so give the music a chance to loop. This presentation is from the tutorial at the beginning of my book, How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003.

For a complete tutorial that includes how to make a presentation open full-screen, go to Michael Koerner’s tutorial.

Ellen Finkelstein can train you or the presenters in your organization to create high-impact, engaging, professional presentations for training, sales, business, or education. For more information, please click here.