Adding Video to a Worksheet

Excel allows you to add more to your workbooks than just numbers or text. You can also add all sorts of other objects. For instance, you can add simple graphics, pictures, or even videos. How you add graphics and pictures has been covered in other ExcelTips. Adding video is a horse of a different color, however.

Why is adding video different? The primary reason is because videos can be so huge. Consider the normal way to add objects:

1. Display the Insert tab of the ribbon.
2. Click the Object tool in the Text group. Excel displays the Object dialog box.
3. Make sure the Create from File tab is displayed. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. Use the controls in the dialog box (specifically the Browse button) to locate the video clip you want to insert.
5. Make sure the Display As Icon check box is selected.
6. Click OK.

Did you notice that the Object dialog box had a check box that controlled whether the video would be linked or not? The default is for the video not to be linked, which means it will be embedded. Videos are notoriously huge, and the size of that video (however many megabytes or gigabytes it is) is added to your workbook when the video is embedded. This makes the workbook much harder to distribute to others.

You might think that the size issue can be solved by not embedding and, instead, linking to the video. While this does solve some issues, it raises others. When the video is linked, only the path to the file is stored in the document, but it is a fully qualified path. This means that, even if both documents are in the same directory, the directory name becomes part of the link. If you move both files or send them to someone else who stores them on their system, the link is automatically broken.

Another thing to keep in mind—regardless of whether you link or embed—is that if you share your workbook with others, they need to have a video player capable of playing the video you've added to the workbook.

A totally different approach is to simply hyperlink to your videos. You can either upload the videos to a video sharing service (such as YouTube) or you can put them on a local drive. Either way, a hyperlink is easy to add to your worksheet. Assuming that the video is something that can be played by your Web browser, the hyperlink could be a good route to go.