Section 98. Add Sound to a Presentation

98. Add Sound to a Presentation

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

96 Insert Graphics into a Presentation

SEE ALSO

100 Add a Slide Transition

99 Impress with Animation Effects

You can add sound to your presentations to accent an effect or to get your audience's attention during slide transitions. Impress supports the following sound file extensions and formats:

• AU and SND files (SUN/ NeXT )

• WAV (Microsoft Windows)

• VOC (Creative Labs SoundBlaster)

• AIFF (SGI/Apple)

• IFF (Amiga)

Surprisingly, there appears to be no way to provide timed narration throughout an entire presentation, as you might want for an automatic presentation. Nevertheless, Impress does support enough sound techniques to pique your audience's attention.

98. Add Sound to a Presentation

NOTES

As with all special effects, don't overdo the use of sound; otherwise , it will distract from your presentation.

You can insert a sound file at any place in a slide by selecting Insert, Object, Sound and navigating to the sound file you want to insert. However, the sound only plays when you double-click it, so this method is not very useful for most presentation purposes.

1.	Select an Object to Apply Sound To Click to select an object on a slide, such as a graphic image or text box. You can attach a sound to this item for a special effect.
2.	Request Interaction Select Slide Show, Interaction to add a sound to the selected image. The Interaction dialog box appears.
3.	Play the Sound at Image Click Click to open the Action at mouse click list box and select Play sound . You have just told Impress that you want to play a certain sound when you click the image.
4.	Locate the Sound Browse your hard disk or network to locate the sound to play. Use the Play button in the Open dialog box to listen to a sound before deciding whether to insert it. Click OK to attach the sound to the image. When you give your presentation ( assuming it's not an automatic presentation, where you cannot add sound linked to a mouse click because no human presenter will be there to click the mouse), you can click the image to produce the sound through the presentation computer's sound card. You can test the sound effect by clicking it from within the Drawing view without having to run your presentation. (To add sound during an automatic presentation, you can select an action such as Action when slide appears .)

NOTES

Obviously, you'll need sound amplification equipment so your entire audience can hear the sound when you trigger it with the mouse click.

When you transition from one slide to the next, you can specify a sound that will play during the transition. See 99 Add a Slide Transition for more information on setting up slide transitions.