Embed YouTube Video in PowerPoint – A Complete Step-by-Step Guide

Unless you want the people in your audience to become the next victims of death by PowerPoint, you’d better put a bit of effort and make your presentation stand out. While this article won’t teach you how to reinvent the wheel (you can get pretty close to that by taking an online course on how to bring the “WOW’ factor to your presentation), it will help you master one important skill: embedding YouTube videos into your presentation.

Unlike social media platforms or other sites where embedding a YouTube clip is as easy as copying the embed code from YouTube and pasting it where you want it, inserting a YouTube video in a PowerPoint presentation calls for a completely different procedure. This article will guide you through the step-by-step process for completing the task in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2003.

A few notes before we begin:

• This method will not work if you’re using a 64-bit version of Microsoft Office due to the lack of 64-bit support for Flash-based content.

• In order to obtain the best results, make sure you have the latest version of Flash Player installed (you can get it by going to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and following the on-screen instructions).

Microsoft Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 is one of the most widely used versions of Office, so we will use this version as a base for our tutorial, showing you how to do the task from start to finish in this version. Because the whole process is identical in all the other version of PowerPoint, beyond a certain point, for the other versions of PowerPoint we will only cover the steps prior that point. Let’s start, shall we?

Step 1: Open your Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and navigate to the slide you want to insert the YouTube video into.

Step 2: Go to the File menu and click on Options.

Step 3: In the PowerPoint Options box, go to Customize Ribbon, tick the Developer Tab box to enable the Developer Tab and then click OK.

Step 4: Navigate to the Developer Tab and click on the More Controls button from the Controls section.

Step 5: Scroll down towards the bottom of the list and look for Shockwave Flash Object.

Step 6: Click on Shockwave Flash Object and click OK; your cursor should automatically change to a cross, allowing you to draw a shape. Draw a rectangle on the slide; it should appear as a white rectangle with a big X across it.

Step 7: Open your preferred web browser, navigate to the YouTube clip you want to use and copy its URL from the address bar. Open up a Notepad and paste the URL there.

Step 8: Modify the URL as follows: remove watch? and replace the = with a /. Your new URL should look something like this:

Step 9: Switch back to PowerPoint, right-click on the flash object and click Properties. This will bring up the Properties box for the flash object.

Step 10: Copy the new URL from your Notepad file into the Movie field of the flash object Properties panel.

Step 11: Set the “Playing” and “Loop” values to False in the flash object Properties panel.

Step 12: Close the Properties box and save your project. You should now have your desired YouTube video embedded in your PowerPoint presentations, like this:

Bonus Tip: If you want to make your embedded clip play automatically when you reach the slide it is on, add &autoplay=1 at the end of the URL of the video, in the flash object properties box.

Ready to learn more about PowerPoint 2010? Check out David Lieberman’s PowerPoint 2010 online course.

Microsoft Office 2007

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 is not very different from 2010, so the steps in the process don’t differ much. In fact, the whole process is identical, except for the steps it takes to get the Developer Tab. Follow these two simple steps to get the Developer Tab:

Step 1: Launch Microsoft PowerPoint 2007. Click on the Ribbon (upper left corner) and select PowerPoint Options.

Step 2: Select the Popular menu on the left and tick the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon box.  

To embed a YouTube video into your presentation just repeat steps 4-12 from the previous section. If you want to learn more about PowerPoint 2007, check out this PowerPoint 2007 introductory online course.

Microsoft Office 2003

Despite being more than 10 years old, Microsoft Office 2003 is still popular. What’s interesting is that, even though Office 2003 was launched before YouTube even existed (YouTube was founded in 2005), it still has the ability to embed YouTube video files in presentations. How awesome is that?

Here are the steps you need to perform in order to embed a YouTube video into your PowerPoint 2003 presentation:

Step 1: Open PowerPoint 2003 and navigate to your desired slide.

Step 2: Go to View, click on Toolbars and check the Control Toolbox option. The Control Toolbox window should appear.

Step 3: In the Control Toolbox window, click on the More Controls icon (bottom right), scroll down to Shockwave Flash Object and click on it. Your cursor should automatically change to a cross, allowing you to draw a shape – sounds familiar?

Step 4: Draw a shape that will contain the flash object (in our case the YouTube video).

As you can guess, the procedure is pretty much the same from this point on, so just follow steps 4-12 from the Office 2010 section and your YouTube video will be embedded.

Ok, so you now have an impressive presentation that will definitely get your audience hooked, but is your opening as strong? It’s a known fact that a presentation that fails to impress right from the beginning is less likely to attract interest along the way, so make sure the efforts you put into creating the perfect presentation are not ruined by a weak opening. Learn how to set the scene and create a killer opening for your presentation from this online course.