How To Create A Screencast With Microsoft PowerPoint

There are a myriad of screencast tools available for Windows 10. Depending on your needs, you can use a feature rich tool like Camtasia or for more basic needs, you can try ScreenToGif. If you have to record something brief and you know you won’t need to edit it post production, you can use PowerPoint. Of course you need to have the Microsoft Office suite installed on your system. Here’s how you can create a screencast with Microsoft PowerPoint.

Screencast With Microsoft PowerPoint

Open a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and go to the Insert tab. At the far right, on the media set of tools, click the Screen Recording button.

This will minimize everything and add a toolbar to the top of your screen. You can record your entire screen, or you can select a particular portion of it and record it. If you want, you can also include a voice over. It’s enabled by default and you have the option to include or exclude the cursor from appearing in the screencast. When you’re ready to record, click the Record button on the toolbar.

You get a brief countdown before the recording begins and PowerPoint will tell you that you can end the recording with the Win+Shift+Q keyboard shortcut.

Once you finish recording, the screencast is automatically added to the PowerPoint presentations. If you want, you can export it to your desktop. Right-click the screencast and select the Save media as option. Select where you want to save it, and you can access it from other apps.

The screencast is saved as an MP4 file which any and all media players and video editing apps including Microsoft’s now dead Movie Maker app can play.

PowerPoint itself has a few very basic video editing tools that allow you to crop a video, add a few transition effects, insert captions, and of course trim the video. This is about as basic as it gets. For more editing options, you can try the Photos app which lets you merge videos together.

There is no way to separate the audio from the video file. If you think you might need to do that in post production than this isn’t the tool you should be using. Even if you record a voice over separately, PowerPoint doesn’t have an option to add an audio track to the video file. You can set it up so that an audio and video file play at the same time but it’s a very clunky solution.