Zip PowerPoint files with video files

I've been working a lot with video in PowerPoint files lately and wanted to pass on one observation that may save you a lot of heartache when you send your presentation and video files to another computer. Many people mistakenly believe that when you import a video file on to a PowerPoint slide that the video file gets saved in the PowerPoint file. PowerPoint cannot embed video files, so you must send the video files and the PowerPoint file to someone if you want them to be able to see the video. I had this happen recently with a client where I e-mailed the PowerPoint file and the video file as separate attachments to the e-mail. Even though I said in the e-mail to copy both files to his computer, only the PowerPoint file was copied. When he tested the presentation, the video would not run. The problem is that you don't get an error, it just doesn't run. One way to tell if the video file is missing, is to right click on the video in edit mode and select Play Movie. If the movie file cannot be found, you will get an error message telling you that is the problem. A safer way to make sure that someone copies both PowerPoint and video files to the computer is to zip the files together, e-mail the zipped file, and have the recipient extract all the files to the same folder. This ensures that all of the required files get copied to the computer. This idea is covered in my video tutorial on incorporating video in your PowerPoint presentations. Click here for more on the tutorial: http://www.thinkoutsidetheslide.com/vtvideo.htm .