Inserting Multimedia Clips

PP07S-2.3.4, PP07S-3.3.3

PowerPoint provides access to hundreds of professionally designed pieces of clip art. These clips include clip art, pictures, photographs, sounds, and videos. All Office 2007 programs includes Microsoft Clip Organizer, which organizes these objects into categories and gives you tools to help locate the clips you need quickly. You can extend the usefulness of the Clip Organizer by importing your own objects. The Clip Art task pane helps you search for clip art and access the clip art available in the Clip Organizer.

Clip Art

Clip art objects (pictures and animated pictures) are images made up of geometric shapes, such as lines, curves, circles, squares, and so on. These images, known as vector images, are mathematically defined, which makes them easy to resize and manipulate. A picture in the Microsoft Windows Metafile (.wmf) file format is an example of a vector image.

Pictures

Pictures, on the other hand, are not mathematically defined. They are bitmaps, images that are made up of dots. Bitmaps do not lend themselves as easily to resizing because the dots can't expand and contract when you enlarge or shrink your picture. You can create a picture using a bitmap graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Paint, or Paint Shop Pro by drawing or scanning an image or by taking a digital photograph.

Sounds

A sound is a file that makes a sound. Some sounds play on your computer's internal speakers (such as the beep you hear when your operating system alerts you to an error), but others require a sound card and speakers. You can use the Windows accessory called Windows Media Player to listen to sound clips.

Videos

A video can be animated pictures, such as cartoons, or it can be digital video prepared with digitized video equipment. Although you can play a video clip on most monitors, if it has sound, you need a sound card and speakers to hear the clip.