How To Let Powerpoint Play Automatically

Video is a great way to engage your audience and add interest to your PowerPoint presentation. Learn how to autoplay video in PowerPoint each time your presentation begins.

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How to Play a Video in a PowerPoint Presentation Automatically

Note: Watch this short tutorial screencast or follow the quick steps below, that complement this video.

1. Insert a Video

PowerPoint supports automatically playing videos right inside of a presentation. If you want to play a video automatically though, you'll need to change a key setting. First, let's insert a video into the PowerPoint presentation.

Go to the Insert tab and choose Video on the right side. Next, choose Video on my PC.

How to play a video in PowerPoint — Use the **Video on My PC** option to play video in PowerPoint.

Now, I'll browse to where I have a video stored and insert it.

Now we have the video on our slide. You could click and drag to reposition it, and you can also press play to start playing the video, but if you wanted to start automatically, here's how you can do that.

2. Set the Video to Play Automatically

Start by making sure we've clicked on the video if it's not already selected, and then let's come over to the Playback tab on PowerPoint's ribbon. On the Playback tab, lets find the drop-down next to start let's choose Automatically from the same list.

Autoplay video in PowerPoint — Turn on autoplay video in PowerPoint.

Switch PowerPoint into Presentation view and you'll see that the video starts playing automatically.

Finishing Up!

This is a great idea when you want the video to start on its own when you're presenting to an audience, so that no clicks are required. Videos with this setting play as soon as you switch to the slide that they're on.

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Do you use video effectively in your PowerPoint presentations? Or, are you planning to add video to your next PowerPoint presentation? Let us know in the comments below.