Hi, Microsoft 365 Insiders! I’m Peter Wu, a Principal Software Engineer on the PowerPoint team. When it comes to captions and subtitles, many of you use the SubRip Text (SRT) format in your favorite apps and services, and you told us you would like to be able to use them in PowerPoint as well, without having to convert them first.
We heard you! We’ve recently added support for SRT files to PowerPoint for Windows, macOS, and the web. These files are converted to the WebVTT format upon insertion to ensure great compatibility with earlier versions of PowerPoint and major web browsers.
Caption videos in PowerPoint with SRT files
There are so many advantages to presenting videos with closed captions! Closed captions make content more inclusive and accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. All viewers can also understand what is being said more easily if the speaker has an accent, they’re speaking softly, or the background or other elements are noisy.
With support for SRT files, captioning videos in PowerPoint is simple and requires much less work for users.
How it works
- Select the embedded video in the presentation that you want to insert captions for.
- Select Playback > Insert Captions (or Video > Edit Captions > Insert captions from file in PowerPoint for the web), and then select the captions file in the SRT format you would like to insert.NOTE: You can insert multiple captions files for the same video.
- When you play the video, click the captions button near the bottom-right corner of the video to select a captions track, then the words will appear as the video plays.
Tips and tricks
- Use one of the many apps and services that support SRT, such as Clipchamp, to create and edit an SRT file.
- If the app or service you are creating an SRT file with allows you to choose an encoding, use UTF-8 for compatibility with PowerPoint and many other apps and services.
- When presenting a video with captions in PowerPoint in a Teams meeting, use PowerPoint Live for the most inclusive experience. Each participant in the meeting can turn on closed captions for videos for themselves even if the presenter doesn’t turn them on. No one else in the meeting will know or see the captions! This even works in the Teams mobile app.
Availability
Insertion of closed captions in SRT format is available in the following versions:
- Windows: Current Channel Version 2411 (Build 18227.10000) or later.
- macOS: Current Channel Version 16.91 (Build 24111020) or later.
- Web: Build 16.0.18306.40500 or later on Windows or macOS.
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
We want to hear from you! Please click Help > Feedback to submit your thoughts about this feature.
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