Microsoft PowerPoint and other multimedia presentation programs, such as Apple Keynote, Google Slides, or OpenOffice Impress, offer a set of tools that are well suited to integrating multimedia sources with text. The Insert Toolbar in PowerPoint, for example, allows you to add images, audio, video, and other media sources along with tables, textboxes, and links. To get started, create a new presentation, and then click on the Insert menu in the command ribbon.

Using a multimedia presentation program to create a multimedia essay invites you to think of the program not as a set of bulleted slides, but as a group of pages that can be filled with various types of media. If you look at each page as a blank canvas, you can see how you might design an essay containing pages that look like those you might find in a magazine or on the Web.