PowerPoint 2010: Audio Won’t Trim? Compress It!

by AJ George

 

Have you ever been frustrated by an inability to trim audio in PowerPoint? Let's say you followed my instructions on how to play two songs sequentially in your PowerPoint presentation. The first track was 2 minutes long, but you trimmed it down to 15 seconds and set it to play across slides.

Perhaps your plan was to play the first track when the presentation started, move to the second slide, let the track end and then have the second track start.

You probably set the second track on the second slide to start right after the first track ended, which is the correct process. However, even though you trimmed the first audio file down to 15 seconds, it kept playing, running into the second track.

Or maybe you've experienced this: You trim an audio track so that it starts 15 seconds into the track and then set it to play across the slides. When you view your presentation, however, you notice that rather than cutting the first 15 seconds from the track, only the first 15 seconds play.

What gives?!

Well, get excited because I'm about to save you a lot of frustration. All you have to do is this:

1. In PowerPoint 2010, select File > Info.
2. From the Media Size and Performance area, click the Compress Media button.
3. Choose one of the three settings to compress the media (I chose Presentation Quality and it worked fine…if yours still doesn't work, choose a lesser quality).

   Unfortunately, I have not found a suitable explanation as to why the trim function in PowerPoint doesn't always work, or why compressing the media helps, but it is nice to know that it is easily remedied. 

About the author: AJ George is IconLogic's lead Technical Writer and author of both "PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials" and "PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials."