Embedding video and audio in PowerPoint

I've spent much of the last couple of weeks building a presentation in PowerPoint for my organisation. The aim was to create an interactive presentation that would play video and audio clips automatically at some points, while allowing viewers to choose options and links at other points. It's been a high learning curve, but I think I've largely cracked it. While PowerPoint is a bit clumsy in the way it does things, it can do them. However, after sending a copy of the presentation to a colleague, I discovered that while PowerPoint embeds photographs and graphics, it does not embed video or audio tracks. This means they do not play on any machine other than mine. After some online searching, I have discovered that the solution is to place the audio and video clips in the same folder (directory) as the presentation, which then happily links to them. You can then place everything in a Zip folder, cut to a disk, or send on a memory stick, and the recipient can happily play your creation.