Hello and welcome to our tutorial on captioning media files in Powerpoint.

Microsoft's Powerpoint application has long allowed users to embed video media into their presentations, but captioning those videos has been a problem.  While it is possible to get some types of captioned media to display captions from within Powerpoint, for example Flash media, most media types do not display captions when playing from within Powerpoint.  Open captioning is always an option, but that involves more work and has a number of drawbacks.

Recently, a new Add-in for Powerpoint became available to address this issue.  The "Sub-titling Text Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint" or STAMP allows you to add captions to any media file that you embed in your Powerpoint presentation.

STAMP is only available for Powerpoint 2010 at this time, and it is not automatically included with Powerpoint, so you will first need to download and install it.  You can get the free plug-in from the Microsoft webpage shown on this slide.

The Microsoft page will guide you through a simple download and install process, which you only need to do once.   STAMP includes the ability to manually enter, format, and synchronize your own captions, or to simply import a caption file.  The Microsoft page includes instructions for how to use STAMP to manually caption; but this tutorial will focus on importing caption files generated by our CaptionSync service.

So, once you have STAMP installed, let's walk through an example.  Start by opening your Powerpoint presentation and inserting a media file.  Next, we'll generate the STAMP caption file for this media.  Log into your CaptionSync account and submit the same media file (or just the audio track if you prefer).  Select the "Advanced Settings" screen, so that we can choose the correct output format.  STAMP accepts what is known as a TTML file, although it is not a true TTML file so CaptionSync has a special TTML format for STAMP called a .ppt.xml format.  You can also set the other formatting characteristics such as line length, color, and font type here.  Note that STAMP ignores multi-line caption formatting - if you choose captions that are more than one line, STAMP will still format them on a single line, so it is best to stick to one line captions for STAMP.

Once you have your captions back, save the .ppt.xml file in a local folder.  Now, in Powerpoint, select the media object you inserted earlier.  Next, select the "Playback" tab under "Video Tools", then click the "Add Captions" option.  Select "Captions From File" and browse to your .ppt.xml file.   Once you import the caption file, you will see the "Edit Captions" button become active - this allows you to adjust the text and/or timing of any of the captions.   You will also see the "Hide" and "Show" options become active - this is how you select whether you want the captions displayed.  

To see the results, select the slide show, and play the media file - you will see the captions appear automatically at the bottom of the slide.  Note that this process will work for any and all types of media that you can embed into your Powerpoint presentation.

While there are a few limitations of the STAMP plugin in terms of the characters it can display and the formatting capabilities, this new feature is a huge step toward in enabling presenters to make their presentations more accessible.

Visit our tutorial library at www.automaticsync.com/help for more information on captioning for Powerpoint, and many other topics.