8. Getting a sound to keep playing while you advance the slides.
(Requested by Dave Connolly)

03/07: Click ‘Insert/Movies and Sounds/Sound from File’ and browse to the sound file you want to play at this point.
It will say ‘how do you want the sound to start in the slide show?’ - click ‘Automatically’.
Drag the sound icon off the side of the slide and drop it where you can still see it.

03: Now right-click the sound icon, and on the menu that appears, click ‘custom animation’.
A toolbar will appear on the right, with your sound file as one of the items on the list. Click the down arrow to the right of the item, then click ‘effect options’.
On the ‘Effect’ tab of the pop-up menu that appears, in the ‘Stop Playing’ option, select ‘After:’ then insert 999 or some other very high number.
The sound will now continue till it runs out, no matter what you do in the slideshow - unless you have more than 999 slides, that is.


07: Thanks to Andrew Park for pointing out that this bit is a little easier in 07 - having inserted the sound, just click the ‘Animations’ tab, look for ‘animate’ at the top left, then on the pull-down menu change “play as part...” to “play across slides”. No need to bother with high numbers, the sound will just play till it runs out.

10: A slight change in the new version - having inserted the sound and moved the icon off the side of the slide, you will see that with the icon selected a new tab called ‘audio tools’ has appeared at the right-hand end of the ribbon. Click [Playback] and change [On Click] to [Play across Slides].

PS: you can play other sounds in later slides while the earlier one is still running, but you’ll need to be careful with the volume controls - also in the pop-up menu in the last step. We used this in making a sales training CD-ROM for a healthcare company, to keep music playing under Nicky’s voiceover. It was the client’s idea to author their CD-ROM in PowerPoint, we proved that it’s possible but we’re not sure we’d recommend it!