Follow these steps:

• Choose Insert> Photo Album. (In 2003, choose Insert> Picture> New Photo Album.)

• Click the File/Disk button. In the Insert New Pictures dialog box, navigate to a folder with your photos. (It helps if they’re all in one folder, but you can add more later from another location.)
• Select the photos you want to include. You can press Ctrl + A to add all of the files in the folder. To select a range, click the first file, press Shift and click the last file. To select individual files, pres Ctrl and click each one you want. When you’re done, click Insert.
• You now see the images listed in the Photo Album dialog box. You can select a photo and click the up or down arrows to rearrange them, but it’s easier to rearrange them in PowerPoint later. You can also use the Rotate, Brightness, and Contrast buttons to modify any photo. In the Album Layout section, you can leave the Fit to Slide default or choose another layout, such as 1 Picture (which doesn’t expand the image to cover the entire slide) or more pictures per slide. If you use one of these options, you might also want to use a theme, since your slides won’t be entirely covered with a photo. In the same Album Layout section, click Browse. Note that vertical photos, like the one you see below, also won’t cover the entire slide. Also, the first slide doesn’t have a photo, although you can change that–I usually delete the first slide.

• Click Create to create the photo album. Here you see the result in Slide Sorter view. These are photos I took at Henry Doorly Zoo, a great place to visit in Omaha, Nebraska!

• Feel free to re-order the slides, which is easy to do in Slide Sorter view. Just drag the slides where you want them.
• I’m not usually a fan of transitions, because I think they’re distracting. You need a real purpose to use a transition. In this case, entertainment is a good enough reason. I chose Cube for all the slides, which is a 3D transition new to PowerPoint 2010. It’s pretty dramatic, so use it only when you think it’s definitely appropriate.
• You can add music if you want! To insert and play music throughout a presentation, see my PowerPoint tip, “Play music or narration throughout a presentation.” However, finding free, legal music isn’t easy. I left out the music.
• If you’ll be showing the slides live, you can just click through them. But if you want the slides to advance automatically, you need to add slide timings. This is important if you want to end up with a video. For information on how to add slide timing, see my tip, “Create a video effect.“
• To create a video in PowerPoint 2010, choose File> Save & Send> Create a Video. Check the settings on the right to make sure it will pick up your slide timings. Then click Create Video. Wait while PowerPoint outputs the video file.

Here’s the result. Each slide displays for 5 seconds; the entire presentation is just over 3 minutes long. Enjoy!

1. Compfight is a tool to search for images on Flikr. letting you easily find images that have Creative Commons or Commercial licenses.
2. DaFont is a site for free fonts. It always helps to include an original font (as long as it’s appropriate for the topic and legible).
3. KeepVid lets you download YouTube videos so you can insert them in your presentations, without requiring an active Internet connection. Update: I’ve been told that this program is against the YouTube Terms of Use, Section 4C. (Thanks, @bwasson.)
4. Note and Point is a site that contains top-quality presentations. It’s a great place to look for design inspiration.
5. SlideShare is a slide-sharing site. While I don’t think its tools are the best, it has the most traffic, so uploading your presentations there will get you the most traffic.

I just finished a training video on “Getting Your Presentation n the Web” and it included a review of all the major slide-sharing sites. If you’re interested, leave a comment and let me know.

Here are some options:

1. Use PowerPoint 2010. It outputs to WMV format. Choose File> Save and Send> Create a Video. Then choose from a couple of options, as you see here. You can use existing timings for each slide or assign a timing. This is the absolute easiest method. The video output will include sounds and narration, and even embedded videos!
2. Use Techsmith Camtasia Studio. For longer presentations, and when you want editing capabilities, Camtasia is a great tool, with lots of features. I use it a lot. Camtasia is video-recording software, so you run through your presentation and Camtasia creates a video. You can record your voice as you go.
3. For presentations under 5 minutes, Techsmith’s Jing is easy to use. Jing Pro (an easy-to-afford $14.95 per year) lets you quickly share to YouTube. Jing is also a video-capture program and you can record your narration as you go.
4. CamStudio is free, open-source video-recording software.  I’ve only tested it once. It doesn’t let you edit your video.
5. Authorstream, a presentation-sharing site, lets you convert up to 5 minutes to video and upload it to YouTube. They have paid versions that will let you convert more time.

To get the best results, you’ll need to know about slide timing and perhaps narration. Go to Create a video effect for information on slide timing and go to  Secrets for successfully narrating a presentation for information on narrating.

When you have your video output, you just upload it to YouTube the same way you would upload any other video.

What tools have you used to put a PowerPoint presentation on YouTube?

1. Display the YouTube movie at YouTube.com.
2. From the URL text box, copy the URL to the clipboard.

1. Choose View> Toolbars> Control Toolbox. (In PowerPoint 2007, go to Developer tab> Controls group. If you don’t see the Developer tab, click the Office button> PowerPoint Options. In the Popular category, check the Show Developer Tab in the Ribbon check box.)
2. Click the Hammer button (More Controls).
3. Choose Shockwave Flash Object from the menu. (In PowerPoint 2007, click OK.)

1. Drag a box across the screen to get the desired size and location. Don’t cover the entire slide.
2. Right click the box and choose Properties.

1. In the Properties window, click the Movie item.
2. Paste the YouTube URL that you copied.
3. In the URL, delete the text watch?.
4. In the URL, replace the = (equal) sign with a / (forward slash). You’ll end up with a URL that looks like http://www.youtube.com/v/0onkpWsGc4A.
5. Set the Loop value to False unless you want the movie to repeat over and over.
6. Set the Playing value to False to allow you to click when you want the movie to start, rather than automatically when you display the PowerPoint slide.
7. Close the Properties window using its close box.
8. Choose Slide Show view to see the movie. Click the Play button to start the movie.

Note: On repeated playing, the movie sometimes starts itself or plays at a quick speed. Just click the Pause button, drag the slider to the left, and click Play.

Once you embed the YouTube video in your PowerPoint presentation, just make sure that your Internet connection is live and you’re set to go!

• Post it on your web site
• Post it on YouTube
• Burn it to a CD and send it to potential clients
• Post it on your blog or Facebook

There are several types of video formats. In this tip, I focus on Adobe’s SWF format. It’s easy to post on a Web site and most computer systems have the viewer. (If not, it’s a free download from Adobe.com. Look for the “Get Adobe Flash Player button.)

YouTube may complain if you use an SWF format that embeds a player button and other controls, but for other uses, the controls are great.

To see the video, click here

How do you convert PowerPoint to SWF? Numerous programs can do this for you. For a long list, go to Robin Good’s Mini-Guide of PowerPoint to Flash Conversion Tools.

As far as I know, the best free tool is iSpring Free. I used it for the movie you see here.

When you install iSpring Free, you get a new tab in PowerPoint 2007 with the conversion tools.

The Quick Publish button converts your presentation to SWF format in one click.

Of course, you may need to set up your presentation appropriately first. In the case of the above movie, I added automatic timings for all the slides to match the length of the sound files that contain my narration. (I recorded the sound in Audacity.)

The result is just 3 files:

1. fixprompt.js is a JavaScript file that contains the playing controls
2. index.html contains the code that embeds the SWF file
3. Slide1.swf is the SWF file

If you want to put the SWF file on its own web page and link to it, you can just rename the HTML file, upload everything, and you’re set. But that’s not usually what you want to do. Instead, you probably want to place the SWF file on an existing page.

My HTML code, after editing, looks like this:

<table width=”360″ height=”320″ align=”center” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ bgcolor=”#d3daed”>
<tr>
<td align=”center” valign=”middle”>
<div align=”center”>

<object id=”presentation” width=”360″ height=”288″ classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash
/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0″ align=”middle”> <param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”sameDomain” /> <param name=”movie” value=”images/Slide 1.swf” /> <param name=”quality” value=”high” /> <param name=”bgcolor” value=”#ffffff” /> <param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true” />

<embed src=”images/Slide 1.swf” quality=”high” bgcolor=”#ffffff” width=”360″ height=”288″ name=”presentation” align=”middle” allowScriptAccess=”sameDomain” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer” allowFullScreen=”true” /> </object> </div></td> </tr> </table>

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”scripts/fixprompt.js”/>

Here’s what you need to do :

1. Open the HTML file in your web authoring software or and text editor.
2. Select the text from the <table> tag to the end of the <script> tag, and copy it to the Clipboard.
3. Display the HTML code for your web page, and place your cursor where you want the SWF file to go.
4. Paste.

Here are some other changes that you may want to make:

1. The size of the movie may be too big. To fix that, change the width and height proportionally in both places (the <object> and <embed> tags).
2. Because the background of many of my slides is white as is the background of my web pages, they blend in to one another. So, I changed background color of the table. I did that by adding bgcolor=”#d3daed” inside the <table> tag. That’s where the blue-gray background comes from.
3. I wanted to change the location of the SWF file and put it in an images folder, so I added images/ before Slide 1.swf in both the <object> and <embed> tags.

• By using transitions between the slides and adding automatic timing. Narration or a sound track are good additions
• By adding animation that creates a seamless flow between the slides. You make the end of one slide (after animation) the same as the beginning of the next slide (before animation). It can be a black background, for a fade to black effect, or an image that covers the entire slide. Again, you would add automatic timing and narration or a sound track.

The animation technique is time consuming, because you need to get the timing just right and there’s quite a bit of artistry involved. So in this post, I’ll focus on transitions. I used to recommend not using transitions because their quality was poor, but in PowerPoint 2010, the transitions are much improved.

Here are the steps to create a fairly simple video-effect presentation:

• Decide on a story line and photos to illustrate the story. The story I used is a visit to Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska. In my case, the photos drove the story, but you could start with a story (let’s say, about your company), and then find visuals to match.
• Write a script and decide which photos should match with each section of the script.
• Attach a mic to your computer and open a sound recording program. I usually Audacity, a free audio recording and editing program. I highly recommend it; it’s used by many professionals. It’s also easy to use. If you download it, be sure to also read the instructions for, and download, the LAME MP3 encoder, which lets you save files in MP3 format. (Note: You can also use PowerPoint’s narration feature and that’s what I did for the video below. But the sound quality isn’t as good; don’t be fooled by what you hear in the video below–I modified it in Camtasia, a video recording and editing program. On the other hand, it’s a lot faster and simpler, because it automatically saves slide timings for you. For more information, see “Secrets for successfully narrating a presentation.”)
• Record and save a separate MP3 file for each slide.
• In PowerPoint 2003, insert the appropriate MP3 file for each slide, by choosing Insert> Movies and Sounds> Sound from File. (In PowerPoint 2007, Insert tab> Media Clips group> Sound drop-down list> Sound from File. In PowerPoint 2010, Insert tab> Media group> Audio drop-down list> Audio from File. ) Choose the Automatically choice when you see this dialog box. The sound will start to play as soon as the slide appears. (This is the default in PowerPoint 2010, but to change it, select the sound icon, click the Playback tab that appears, and change the setting from the Start drop-down list.) Drag the sound icon just off the slide.

• In Windows Explorer, right-click the MP3 file, and choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box, click the Details tab to find the length of the sound. (In PowerPoint 2010, select the sound icon and you’ll see a play timeline. Move the cursor to the end and you’ll see a tooltip with the length of the sound.)

• Once you know the length of your sound file, set slide timing to match. In 2003, choose Slide Show> Slide Transition (In 2007, Animations Tab> Transitions to This Slide group. In 2010, Transitions tab, Timing group.) In the Advance Slide section, check the Automatically After check box and enter the number of seconds, which should be equal to, or slightly more than, the length of the sound. Again, you may want to adjust the timing slightly after viewing the result. Do this for all the slides.
• Go into Slide Sorter view to add a transition before each slide. Part of this effect involves choosing a variety of transitions. You choice will depend on the purpose of your presentation. For my slides of photos of the zoo, I felt free to use dramatic transitions. For a business presentation, you would probably choose subtler effects. Select the second slide (I like the first slide to appear without a transition). In PowerPoint 2003, choose Transitions on the Slide Sorter toolbar and choose a transition in the Slide Transition task pane. Choose a speed from the Speed drop-down list. (In PowerPoint 2007, go to Animations tab. In the Transitions to This Slide group, expand the gallery and choose a style. From the Transition Speed list, choose a speed. In PowerPoint 2010, go to the Transitions tab. Choose a transition from the gallery and a speed in the Duration text box.)

View the animation: