Google slides is a very useful presentation tool by Google. It’s a lot like Microsoft Powerpoint but instead of being part of Microsoft Office, It’s made by Google and can be used for free in the cloud.
When you’re making a presentation in Google Slides, you might want to add audio to your presentation. Whether you want to add music to make it more interesting, or perhaps a voice-over explaining what it’s about. Google Slides has a very easy way to insert audio into your presentation.
Prefer to watch a video on how to add audio to Google Slides? Click here.
How To Add Sound To Google Slides
Before you can insert your audio into your presentation, you will need to upload the audio file to Google Drive. If the audio you want to use is already on Google Drive, you can skip this step, but if it’s on your computer, you’ll need to upload it.
Go to https://drive.google.com/ and sign in to your Google account if necessary. If you have multiple Google Accounts, make sure you are signed in to the one you are using for the presentation.
Once you’re in Google Drive, click on the “New” button in the top left-hand corner, click “File upload”, and select the audio file you want to use.
Once you’ve chosen your file, it will begin to upload. You’ll know it’s finished uploading when you see a green tick next to it in the bottom right corner of the screen.
If you plan on sharing your Google Slide with anyone, you’ll also need to share the audio file. Otherwise, anyone you share the presentation with will not be able to hear the audio.
The easiest way to do this is to enable link sharing. With link sharing enabled, anyone who has a link to the file will be able to access it. But it also means anyone who is looking at the Google Slides presentation will be able to access it.
To enable link sharing, find the file in Google Drive.
Click on it once so that it is selected but doesn’t start playing, and click on the Share icon in the top right-hand corner.
In the box that appears, click on “Change to anyone with the link” to allow everyone to access it.
Link sharing is now enabled! Click “Done” and you will now be able to actually add the audio to your presentation.
How To Insert Audio Into Google Slides
Now that your audio is in Google Drive with the correct sharing settings enabled, you can add it to your presentation. Open your presentation and go to the slide where you want the audio to start. Once you add it you’ll be able to choose whether or not it continues playing through all the slides but you need to add it to the slide you want it to start playing on.
If you want it to play for the entire presentation, add it to the first slide. So once you’ve chosen the correct slide, click on “Insert” in the top menu and click on “Audio” in the drop-down menu that appears.
Now you will see a box with all the audio files you have in your Google Drive, and you’ll need to find the audio file you want to insert and double click on it.
Now the audio will be added to your presentation and you will see a whole lot of options on the right-hand side of the screen.
The first option is when you want it to start playing, by default it will only start playing when you click on the audio icon. But you can set it to “Automatically” if you want it to start playing when you start presenting.
The next option is volume, by default it is set to maximum volume but you can lower it a bit if you feel like it’s too loud.
The next option is “Hide icon when presenting”, this option is only availabel if you have it set to start playing automatically. But if you do have it play automatically, it can be nice to be able to remove the distracting audio icon.
The next option is “Loop audio”, If you have a rather long presentation and you want to have music playing throughout the entire thing, you can click “Loop audio” and if the music comes to an end it will just start playing from the start again.
The next option is “Stop on slide change”, this is quite an important one. When it’s ticked, the audio will stop playing when you move to the next slide. It will be ticked by default and can be good for certain circumstances but if you want the audio to play throughout the entire presentation, you’ll want to make sure you uncheck that box.
All the other options are related to the style of the audio icon. If you chose to have the icon visible, you can adjust things like the size, color, transparency, and more. All these options are fairly self-explanatory so I won’t bore you explaining them all. But if you feel like the icon doesn’t really fit in with the theme of your presentation, these options can help to customize it a bit.
So there you have it, now your presentation has audio playing just the way you want. hopefully, you found this helpful and if you have any other questions, feel free to ask them in the comments down below.
