Of all the issues that vex PowerPoint users, video seems to be the most common and unfortunately the most difficult to solve.

That said, we can help! We have included this information here rather than in the book, because the issues keep changing and the book will rapidly get out of date on this problem.

PowerPoint supports a number of video formats - well actually, Windows supports a number of video formats. PowerPoint doesn't do anything with video. It does not embed it in your presentation. It calls upon Windows to show the video within the PowerPoint presentation. So two obvious problems:

1. If you prepare a PowerPoint presentation on a Mac and then try to show it on a PC it will probably not show the video (and vice versa).

2. Your video file(s) must be in the same directory as your presentation. That is where PowerPoint looks for them. If you take your presentation on the road, you must also take the video file(s), maintaining the file relationship.

You may want to begin by adjusting your hardware acceleration, see this help file.

Is your copy of windows up to date?

A common problem is that the video displays fine on the laptop but only a black box appears on the screen from the projector. There is a help page for this problem here.

Often video problems are related to the linkage to the video file. It is good practice to place the video file in the same folder as your presentation before you add the link in powerPoint. PowerPoint will then always look in the same folder, even if you move both to another machine.

Avoid having the video (or presentation) too far down a long file name. Best to have it on your desktop or in something like C:\talks. Long file names can cause havoc!

Do you have mplayer on the machine. Not Windows Media Player, that is different. Go to Start > Run and type mplay32.exe and open the video file and click the Play icon. Does that work?

Sometimes third party software will take over control of multimedia and mess with these functions. To learn more read Austin Myer's tutorial on Sonia Coleman's site here.

You need the correct codecs on your machine, again Sonia's excellent tutorial tells you how to check this. If you need the common codecs, look here.

Echo has a very useful page of practical tips for solving problems here.

Finally, horror of horrors. You get to the conference and despite all of your efforts, and your checks back at base, your video fails to show. Here is Terry's hot tip.

Open Windows Movie Maker (Start>All programs>Accessories>Windows Movie Maker). Import your video - you might want to use the PET video on the CD to test this).

Now drag the movie clip from the top storyboard to the bottom timeline:

Now "Save" the movie "for playback on your computer", choosing to save it in the same folder as your presentation, with a new name. Go back to your presentation, delete the faulty movie and add a new movie, choosing the updated version.

This has solved video problems when all else has failed - if it works for you, take a deep breath, bless me and tell everyone at the conference to buy the book! If it doesn't work, please let us know, we all need to learn!

Sound related problems are also dealt with on Echo's site.