Videos are a perfect way to stand out from your peers and competitors and get people excited about your product or subject. Unlike boring, text-based descriptions, videos allow you to speak to potential customers and fellow students in a way that goes beyond words and into their emotions – letting them see what you’re talking about and giving them a more detailed glimpse at your presentation and improve the audience engagement.
Luckily, Google Slides has given us an option to add videos, so you can make your presentations more entertaining.
Why should you use videos on Google Slides?
Videos are an essential part of any kind of presentation software. Videos are one of the most popular types of content on the web. They can make any type of presentation more exciting and engaging for your audience. When you add videos to a presentation, your audience becomes captivated by what you’re showing. If you want to show how people interact with your product or service, upload a video showing it in action.
How to import a video in Google Slides?
YouTube is among the most popular streaming services and arguably the oldest of the big five. Since Google owns YouTube, there is a way to integrate seamlessly.
Step 1. Open your Google Slides presentation
Step 2. Select “Insert”
In the second step, you should select “Insert” and pick “Video”.
Step 3. Choose your embedding option
When you click on Video, you will notice that you have three options available:
- Search.
- By URL.
- Google Drive.
Search is typically used when you want to find a relevant video to your topic, and you type in your search query. It is a very good option for having a quick thought and adding some finishing touches at the last moment. However, it is not a good alternative for in-depth searches, since the window bar is too small.
URL is a very good way to embed a video in Google Slides. It allows you to scroll among many videos on YouTube, and once you find a relevant one for the presentation, just copy the link and paste it into the empty box.
Google Drive is the only option to add non-YouTube videos to your Google Presentation. However, you should upload the video first onto Drive, and only then you will be able to access it. Finish the step by marking the video and clicking on Select.
Step 4. Set the video playback
Once you’re ready with your video, you may need to make sure your playback works normally. The first thing you notice is you will have a default option Play (on click). In this case, the video will play when you advance the slide (click ➡️). But there is a dropdown menu with two more options. Play (automatically) means the video will play once you open the slide where the video is, and the last option – Play (manually) – will be triggered, once you start the video by yourself.
You can also set a specific time for the video to be played. By default, the video will play from start to end. However, you have the option to set an exact time frame – in our case, we will play the video from the 15th sec to the 31st. This is an awesome thing, since you will present part of videos that are relevant to your presentation, and won’t bother with editing.
The last part is you can Mute audio if you think it will distract the audience from hearing your voice.
Step 5. Format the video
You have the option to alter the width and height of your video window, as well as lock the aspect ratio to keep proportions and avoid blur. Below, you have a dropdown default option Top left but you can also select Center.
Conclusion
We hope we helped you embed a video in your presentation. As you could see, it is not a hard task and it takes just a couple of simple steps before you get there.
If our tutorial has helped you, why don’t you check some of our other guides to make even better presentations:
