The aim of this piece is to introduce you to recording audio, and if needed video, through Microsoft PowerPoint to suitably record lectures for teaching.

I’m going to start off with the basics, and then add in a few more complex examples further on.

Note: This guide is focused on using Office 365 for Windows 10. If you’re using a MacOS you may face issues that I don’t address. Google is the best place to go to solve any problem you may have

Activating the Record Ribbon table

Whilst you can activate the record functions in PowerPoint via a few different routes, if you’re going to be recording whole lectures, or making videos, then the best thing to do is activate the recording ribbon.

1. Click on ‘File’
2. Click on ‘Options’
3. Click on ‘Customise ribbon’
4. In the right hand side column, click on the check box for ‘Recording’

Basic voice recording of a lecture

Once you’ve set up your slides as required (animations, transitions, etc), you can select the ‘record slide’ option to bring up the recording view. Primarily here you’ll find your left and right arrows at either side of the slide, and up the top your record/stop/play buttons. To turn video on/off (i.e. to show your face or not), there are some buttons in the bottom right hand side of the screen.

To record yourself, click on the ‘record’ button. You’ll get a 3-2-1 countdown, and the recording will start after that.

• To activate an animation, click on the right/next arrow.
• To pause the recording without ending it, select ‘pause’
• To stop the recording altogether, hit ‘stop’
• To use the pointer, right click on the slide, select ‘pointer options’, and pick ‘laser pointer’
• If you’d prefer to have the mouse visible at all times instead, ‘right click’ on the slide, select ‘pointer options’, select ‘mouse options’, and select ‘visible’
• If you transition to the next slide, the recording will continue. The benefit of PowerPoint is that the bits recorded will remain with each slide Individually. So if you transition, then make a mistake on the new slide, your previous slide’s recording will be saved and you can just redo the current slide.

Note:

1. If you ‘stop’ the recording, rather than pause it, pressing record again will overwrite what was previously recorded. If you want to avoid this, follow the next section on ‘Adding additional sound files to your slides’
2. If you plan on using the laser pointer for a slide, activate it before you start recording

Editing your recorded audio

Once you’ve recorded audio for a slide you will see a small speaker icon in the bottom right corner of your slide. If you click on this speaker, you’ll see two new Ribbon menu appear: ‘Audio Format’ and ‘Audio Playback’.

If you select ‘Audio Playback’, you should see one of the options is to ‘trim audio’. Selecting this option brings up the following pop-up

Adding additional sound files to your slides

If you’ve recorded a few lectures, you may have found that after carefully explaining your slide for 3 minutes, you end up making an error. Now whilst you have learnt how to trim that last few seconds out where you’ve made a mistake, we’ve also learnt that if you go back to the recording window, it’ll overwrite your recording. So what do we do?

We can actually record sound separately to the recording window and embed it into the slide, as long as you don’t need a pointer for it, following these steps

1. Click on the Recording ribbon
2. Click Audio and select ‘Record Sound’
3. Record your additional sound, you’ll see a new speaker icon appear on the slide
4. Go to the ‘Animation’ ribbon, and set it to play after the narration audio. You may have to manually set it to play after x seconds, where x is the length of the initial narration.
5. If you record any additional audio for the slide, it should automatically set to play after the initial additional sound.

Note: Technically speaking, you could record all your audio using this option, then when you click on ‘record slide show’, and click ‘record’ the audio will begin playing. Then rather than recording your audio at this time, you can simply record your animations and pointer to align with your already recorded sound.

Exporting your Lecture

Once you’ve completed your lecture, the material can be exported to a video file for upload.

In the Recording ribbon, click on ‘Export to Video’, then in the menu that appears reduce the quality to standard (480p), and click ‘Create Video’. You can select where you wish to save the file too, and PowerPoint will then take a few minutes to produce the output mp4 file.

Finished!

I hope this guide was useful, feel free to share, comment, suggest changes, or request additions.