How to caption embedded media in Windows PowerPoint 2010 or later

If you're on a Windows system and using PowerPoint 2010 or later, you have the option of using the STAMP plugin to caption your media files. This tutorial will show you how to add closed captions to the video and audio files in your presentation.

Text Tutorial

Since releasing PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft has made a plugin available that makes it easier to caption media files embedded in your PowerPoint presentation. The Sub-titling text add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP) plugin is available freely through the Microsoft website.

Install STAMP:

STAMP is not included in PowerPoint automatically. So, follow these instructions to download and install it.

Submitting Your Media for Captioning:

1. In your CaptionSync account, go to Caption/Transcribe -> Advanced Settings. Under the Output Types tab, select the .ppt.xml output file:

Click on the Caption Appearance tab. STAMP ignores line breaks in the captions, so select just one line of captioning, next to Lines per Caption. Choose a line length suitable for the width of your video. Typically you will want something somewhere between 64 and 80 characters.

2. Make your Captioning request, using the media file you wish to embed into your PowerPoint presentation.

3. Once captions are completed, go to the Submission Details Page and download the .ppt.xml caption file to your system.

Importing the Captions into PowerPoint:

1. Open your PowerPoint presentation and click the Insert tab. Insert your video file into your PowerPoint presentation using the Video button. 

2. Now, select the media you just embedded. Select the Playback tab under Video Tools, then click on the Add Captions option. Select Captions From File and browse to your .ppt.xml file. Once you import the caption file, you will see the Edit Captions button become active - this allows you to adjust the text and/or timing of any of the captions. You will also see the Hide and Show options become active - this is how you select whether you want the captions displayed.

3. Now, just select the slide show and play your media file – you will see the captions appear at the bottom of the screen.

Important Notes:

• STAMP is fairly limited in terms of the formatting styles it can support. In particular, it does not support in-line italics, nor does it support different font types. If you use these features in CaptionSync, no errors will be generated, but they will not appear in your STAMP captions. Also, STAMP does not support some characters; of special note, the > character is not supported (which is commonly used for identifying new speakers), so it will not appear in your STAMP captions.

• If you're on a Mac, we recommend adding Open Captioning to your video files, and then uploading that version of the media to your PowerPoint presentations.

• If you want to extract multiple media files embedded in a PowerPoint 2010 presentation in a single step, you can extract them by converting the presentation to a “zipped” file folder. The media files will be contained in the resulting .ppt folder, inside the .zip folder. Open the .ppt folder and copy the media files into another location in your computer. Once the media files are copied into another location, you can restore the PowerPoint presentation by changing the extension back from .zip to .pptx.