You can insert YouTube videos in your PowerPoint presentations in two ways. You can either “embed” the Flash video in the slide itself or you can link to the YouTube video from the slide that will auto-play when the presenter clicks on the video link.

Which approach should you follow? It depends on the venue of the conference. If they will have high-speed Internet (or Wi-Fi) at the venue, you can stream the YouTube video live from the Internet else you may download the YouTube video on to your computer and embed it as a local file into the relevant slide of your presentation.

Embed YouTube Videos Directly into PowerPoint

This is the recommended option if you are sure that the presentation venue will have good Internet connectivity.   Download and install the YouTube Wizard plug-in from here and it will add a new “Insert YouTube Video” command to your PowerPoint Toolbar.

You simply have to type the URL of the YouTube video and follow the wizard to embed the YouTube video player in your current PowerPoint slide. You can re-size and reposition the video player just like any other object on the slide.

Play YouTube Videos in PowerPoint without Internet

The only problem with the above approach is that it streams live YouTube videos and thus an internet connection is required to playback the video during the slideshow. If you plan to deliver a presentation in a classroom where there will be no internet, take the following approach.

First download the YouTube video to your computer in either Windows Media or AVI format since PowerPoint doesn’t understand the default FLV or MP4 formats of YouTube. Once the video is saved as an AVI or WMV file, switch to PowerPoint and choose Insert – > Movie – > “Movie from file” to put the YouTube video into the current slide.

Get Videos from Google Docs into PowerPoint

Now consider another possible case – you spent lot of effect preparing an elaborate presentation inside Google Docs with several YouTube clips but how do you import all this into PowerPoint.

While Google Docs does provide an “Export as PPT” option, the problem with this format is that it converts all embedded YouTube clips into static images which is something you don’t want. There’s however a simple workaround – just publish that Google Docs presentation as an HTML slideshow and then insert it like a web page in PowerPoint. Thus you can play YouTube clips inside PowerPoint even though they are part of your Google Docs presentation.

An advantage of this approach is that if you change any of the YouTube videos clip in your original Google Docs presentation, it will be reflected in the PowerPoint presentation as well.

Also see: Embed Web Videos in PowerPoint (for Office 2010)