Spice-up your PowerPoint with music!

You can spice-up your PowerPoint presentations by playing some music along with a screen show, especially if you're showing pictures of a club activity or ministry activity to a group of audience.

It is quite easy once you are aware of a few basic rules:

1. CD music tracks are not saved as part of the presentation. If you play the presentation again, and you don't hear any music, you probably need to put the audio CD in the drive.
2. PowerPoint 97 has a bug. If you are still using PowerPoint 97, you may want to upgrade. If not, you'll have to live with a bug in that version that doesn't allow it to play the last track of any audio CD.
3. PowerPoint cannot play non-consecutive tracks. In other words, you can play tracks 3, 4 and 5 in succession. However, you can't play tracks 3, 5 and 8.

Now for the good news. Here are the steps:

1. Make sure you have the audio CD with the music you want is located in the CD drive.
2. Open a new or existing presentation in PowerPoint and navigate to the first slide. Now choose Insert Movies and Sound Play CD Audio Track, as shown above.
3. In the Insert CD Audio dialog box, choose the track on the CD with the music you want to start with and the last track you want to be played. You can opt to start in the middle of a track by providing specific timings. You also can opt to loop the sound continuously.
4. PowerPoint may ask you if you want the sound to play automatically. Be sure to accept this option.
5. PowerPoint places a CD icon on the slide. You can drag the icon off the slide area if you don't want it to be visible while you are playing the presentation.

To make your CD track play across slides, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the CD icon on the slide and choose ‘Custom Animation' from the context menu. (On the Mac, Ctrl + click on the icon to see the context menu.)The custom animation task pane is activated. Within the pane, you see the name of your sound file listed.
2. Click the downward pointing arrow next to the sound file to show a drop-down menu. Choose Effect Options within this menu. (On the Mac, you'll find an Effect Options button.)