Nov 17 2008

Inserting YouTube Videos into PowerPoint Presentations

With the growing popularity of YouTube, more and more people are interested in adding YouTube videos to their PowerPoint presentations. It might be a funny YouTube video to engage your audience at the beginning of your presentation or an informative video that ties in directly with your main message. But how can you get a YouTube video into your PowerPoint slides?

Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration posted a great article on how to insert YouTube Videos into PowerPoint presentations. As a summary of his article, Amit covers two key approaches: one method requires an internet connection to display YouTube videos and another approach that doesn’t.

In the approach which requires internet access, you install a YouTube wizard add-in from OfficeTips to set up the YouTube videos for display in your slides. In the internet-independent approach, you use an online file conversion tool such as Zamzar.com or MediaConverter.org to convert the YouTube video into an AVI or WMV file, which you can then insert into your PowerPoint slides. Amit’s article includes instructional videos on both of these approaches, and it also covers a third approach using Google Docs.

I tested both of the PowerPoint approaches, and they both work well. Unless you are very confident that you will have good internet connectivity, I would lean towards the approach that doesn’t require internet access to be on the safe side. Murphy’s Law and PowerPoint presentations seem to cross paths way too frequently.

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9 Responses to “Inserting YouTube Videos into PowerPoint Presentations”

  1. Jan Schultink says:

    Thank you for the summary. Another vote for method number 2 here.

  2. Pedro Ricart says:

    There is a better way to insert You Tube videos in PPt, you will need to download a free program called You Tube Downloader (http://youtubedownload.altervista.org) , it will download the video and also will allow you to convert the downloaded video in a format that is compatible with ppt like WMV

  3. pptninja says:

    I downloaded and tried this tool. It was fairly good except for one small problem where it downloaded the file as a .docx file (???) and then I had to change the file extension to .flv so that I could convert it into a .wmv file. I would like this application even more if it wasn’t a two-step process — just download and convert all in one action.

  4. Pedro Ricart says:

    That is a good sugestion
    But it has worked for me pretty nicely

  5. Marc "The PowerPoint Guy" says:

    I think you meant WMV – not WMA

  6. pptninja says:

    Thanks Marc. I fixed it in the article.

  7. [Meme] The Presentation Alphabet | Project Presentation says:

    […] – Multimedia. Images, audio, video… Multimedia can really empower your message and engage your audience. Here’s an article to learn to embed Youtube videos in powerpoint . […]

  8. joe walker says:

    Hello Ninja,

    Zamzar.com and MediaConverter.org do not allow YouTube conversions anymore, FYI..

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