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Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Peter Wu, a Principal Software Engineer on the PowerPoint team. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day yesterday, I’m excited to share an update in Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac that makes captioning embedded videos in presentations quick and easy.

Easily caption videos in PowerPoint for Mac

Many of you already know that including videos in your presentation can help you engage your audience and land your message. But did you know that captioning your videos can make them even more engaging and accessible of a diverse audience?

For 5% of the world population who are deaf or hard of hearing, captions are essential for understanding spoken dialogue in videos. Closed captions also benefit so many more people – consider, for example, that 50% of Americans prefer watching videos with captions on most of the time.

Now, in PowerPoint for Mac, you can generate captions in seconds using speech recognition, review and edit them for accuracy, clarity, or emphasis, and translate them into additional languages. With captions, you can better connect with your audience!

How it works

1. Open a new or existing presentation in PowerPoint on your Mac device and embed a video.


2. Select the video, then select Playback > Edit Captions. You can also find the Edit Captions button in the context menu that appears when you right-click on the video, or in the Accessibility tab that appears when Accessibility Assistant is open.


3. Select the Generate Captions from: dropdown menu under the Closed Captions pane on the right side of your presentation, then select the language spoken in the video. When the captions are done generating, they will appear in the Closed Captions pane.
   

    

   
   


4. Select a text cue to view that part of the video. Compare the spoken dialogue with the text cue and edit if needed.
   

    

   
   


5. Translate captions into additional languages by selecting the Translate to: dropdown menu, then selecting the language you want to translate them into.
   

    

   
   NOTE: The translated captions will appear in the Closed Captions pane when translation is done.
   

    

   
   


6. Select < Tracks to see the list of all captions tracks for the video.
   

    

   
   


7. From here, insert more tracks, remove a track, and/or reorder the tracks.
   

    

   
   


8. If you have a favorite app or service for captioning videos that can save the captions as a WebVTT or SRT file, insert the file into your presentation by selecting Insert Captions from File in the Closed Captions pane.

         NOTE: You can select multiple files at once.

Tips and tricks

• Apply bold, italic, and underline formatting to caption text to emphasize certain words or phrases, or add music symbols around song lyrics.


• For videos with more than one person speaking, include the name of the person speaking in the captions.


• Describe note-worthy sounds such as “[phone ringing].”


• Insert and remove text cues as needed.


• Present using PowerPoint Live in Teams so that each participant can select their preferred captions track when viewing videos without anyone else knowing.


• You can caption audio objects in the same way as video objects.

Availability

The ability to caption videos in PowerPoint for Mac is available to Beta Channel users running Version 16.98 (Build 25050401) or later.

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Feedback

Please click Help > Feedback in PowerPoint to submit your thoughts about this feature. We’re excited to hear from you!

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