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Embedding the Windows Media Player Control in an Office Document

[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

Embedding the Windows Media Player control in an Office document is an easy way to add dynamic, interactive digital media content to an otherwise static document. For example, you can create a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel and insert a "talking head" video summarizing a report, or you can create a Microsoft Word document and insert a short animation illustrating a point made in the text. If you don't like the user interface provided by the control, you can use Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to provide a custom user interface.

Embedding the Windows Media Player control in a Microsoft PowerPoint® slide show lets you supplement the dynamic effects already provided by that program. When you save the presentation as a webpage, the Windows Media Player control is embedded in the HTML as described in Using the Windows Media Player Control in a Web Page. This lets you add additional script code that you may have developed for other webpages.

Another way to easily generate webpages that embed the Windows Media Player control is with Microsoft FrontPage®. FrontPage lets you rapidly create a page, add the Windows Media Player control from a menu, and configure it in a properties dialog box. Again, the resulting HTML embeds the Windows Media Player control just as described previously.

Embedding the Windows Media Player Control

Using the Windows Media Player Control with Microsoft Office