How to Edit PowerPoint Narrations

The quality of your narrated PowerPoint slides is subject to many varations. You can gain more control by observing the following guidelines:

• Some methods of saving slides give you a choice or image type, usually ".gif" or ".jpg", and some do not. If you have a choice, and your slides are text only, or contain cartoon or logo type images, then choose ".gif"; if your slides contain photographic images or those with continuous shading, choose ".jpg". These choices yield the highest quality images
• The best microphone is contained in a headset and gives you more consistant quality because the distance and direction of your mouth to the microphone are constant
• If you don't have a headset, be sure that the microphone is well away from your monitor or any other electrical/electronic device, or it will pick up a loud rumble from the electrical interference. Also, try to mantain a constant distance and direction from the microphone
• Note that editing a slide with the Sound Recorder utility may produce differences in tone or quality from the other slides
• Try to insure that unexpected sounds don't interfere with your narration, by closing doors, windows, unplugging the phone, etc.
• You can also control the sound quality both in PowerPoint and in Sound Recorder. When you invoke PowerPoint Narration you are given a menu that lists various properties, such as "Quality", "Disk Use", and so on. If you click on Settings... you can select a range from CD quality (the highest), to Telephone quality (the lowest). CD quality is best but it produces files that are about 8 times the size of Radio quality files which in turn are twice the size of Telephone files. In "Sound Recorder" you can find a somewhat similar menu under Edit > Audio Properties

Class Topics

Philosophy of MultiMedia Presentations

Hardware and Software Requirements

How to Create Narration of the Web

How to Edit Narration

Notes on Sound and Picture Quality

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