As a Zoom instructor, I look for ways to improve/simplify my workflow. Workflow in this context includes the number of steps or transitions one makes during a presentation. In my PowerPoint presentations, I have both word slides and short videos. So, rather than exiting the PowerPoint slideshow to play a video, I prefer to ’embed’ the video in the PowerPoint file and play the video in sequence with the presentation flow.
To do this, one must import the video into the PowerPoint presentation. The video then becomes part of the presentation and is no longer dependent on the original video file. One caution when doing this is that large video files will tend to bloat the size of the original PowerPoint file. This may or may not be a problem depending on the ability of your presentation PC to handle large files, but just be aware of the potential issue.
Below is a YouTube link if you care to view my ‘how-to’ video of the process from downloading a video from YouTube using y2mate.com to importing that file into PowerPoint. One other thing I do frequently is edit videos I will incorporate in my PowerPoint presentations. I use OpenShot Video Editor for this purpose. This process is covered below in the second YouTube video for those interested in using only short segments of YouTube videos.
Here’s the YouTube link for embedding videos in PowerPoint (note: this version of PowerPoint is included with Microsoft 365 – older versions of PowerPoint might not support this feature):
Editing a YouTube video to select only a short portion of a longer video using the OpenShot Video Editor:
Enjoy!
