This quick tutorial comes thanks to a client who asked me this very question yesterday. She had a PowerPoint presentation and wanted to insert a video from YouTube into one of the slides. It used to be the case that you had to download & save the video as an mp3 file (or similar) in order to do this, making sure the file was saved in the same folder as the actual presentation otherwise it wouldn’t work. However, more recent versions of MS Office have made the process simpler; this short tutorial will show you how to do this using PowerPoint version 2010 🙂

Firstly go to the slide where you want the video to be placed, click the Insert tab on the ribbon and go to Video (in the Media group). Click the drop down arrow & select Video from Web Site…

Next go to the video in YouTube which you want to use.  Click on Share beneath the video, and then click Embed.  The code should automatically be highlighted and just press Ctrl+c (to copy)…

Go back to your presentation and press Ctrl+v (to paste) in the dialogue box that’s open, then click Insert…

A black box will now appear in the slide where the video is placed.  You can now edit the video using the Format tools which opens on the ribbon…

If you want to preview the video at any time, click on the video so Video Tools is open on the ribbon and press Play on the ribbon…

And that’s it – a quick way to insert video into your presentation 🙂

TIP – One thing to remember when using this option is that the computer you’re using for the presentation must be connected to the internet when you play the video. Therefore you need to bear in mind that there’s always the possibility of a slow connection, the video being removed from YouTube, or no internet connection at all!