Return to First Slide and Audio No Longer Plays in PowerPoint

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We hear this question so often! You set an audio clip to play across slides, and then you return to the first slide by pressing the Home button, or any other way. Now the audio no longer plays automatically. Why?

The solution to this problem is essentially a workaround:

1. Insert the audio clip (sound) you want to play across slides on the first slide, as you would typically do. Test by playing your slides and be sure that your sound plays across slides.
2. Now add a new slide before your first slide, so that the sound now plays from your second slide. The first slide contains no sound, and is something we will call a ‘buffer slide.’
3. Add any transition to the first slide (we chose the Fade transition in PowerPoint). Set the Transition time to advance slide automatically after zero seconds, as can be seen in Figure 1, below.

Now when you choose any shortcut to get to the first slide in Slide Show view (press the Home button, quickly type 1 and Enter keys, or press both the Left and Right buttons of your mouse for a few seconds), you will get to your ‘buffer slide.’ which will instantly transition to the second slide where your audio clip will start playing!

Figure 2, below shows the Before and After scenarios, as per this workaround.

Figure 2: Return to First Slide and Audio No Longer Plays in PowerPoint