Powerpoint Vs Windows Movie Maker?

Question

I am faced with a problem with each of them. While Powerpoint is an excellent tool to create picture-text shows, Movie Maker is handy with both images and videos.

But there is a problem:

With Powerpoint, you can not conveniently insert audio clips into shows and even if you manage to do, the same audio will not play on other compupters if the audio file is not present there at the exact location.

With Movie Maker you can conveniently add audio files to your project but the text [in labels, descriptions, illustrations, titles etc] will look really bad when the movie is ready. This problem is irrespective of the screen resolution you select.

Now, can any of you address each of these problems and suggest possible solutions ?

Spoilers may please stay out.

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Answer 1

Oh how I love your name!

Audio clips are handled by PowerPoint in one of two ways.

.wav files ---
By default, these files are imbedded (included right into the presentation file) if they are smaller than 100k. There's a preference you can use to adjust this to a higher number. PowerPoint > Preferences > General > Link Files Greater than .... and here you fill in a number that is larger than the sound file you want to embed. (For Windows versions of PowerPoint you'll find this in Tools > Options).

All other sound file formats---
PowerPoint thinks of these as "movies" and instead of trying to play the sounds by itself, PowerPoint relies on a player (this happens without you noticing). These files are always linked. There's a couple different ways to deal with this situation.

In PowerPoint you would use File > Save As and choose the file type PowerPoint package. That creates a folder with a copy of your presentation and copies of all the required sound files. The presentation has all the links corrected for you.

Unless you are using a Windows version of PowerPoint, in which case you have to do this manually. First you make an empty folder. Then put copies of all the sound files into that folder (do not make any subfolders). Then put the presentation into that folder. Then delete all the existing sound files and re-insert the sound files using the files in the folder. This creates a "relative" link instead of an "absolute" link, so that if you make copies of the entire folder all the links will be kept intact.

-Jim Gordon
Microsoft Mac MVP

MVPs are independent and do not work for Microsoft
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

Answer 2

It's the same thing....