Editing Media Bookmarks in PowerPoint

As reported in many places, such as here, PowerPoint does not let you change the position of a media bookmark once in place.

You can delete it, but you can't move it.

But if you delete a bookmark, any animation attached to that bookmark is deleted too.

So, how to do it?

It's simple, but laborious.

1. Save your presentation and close it.
2. Rename the presentation file extension to a ZIP.
3. Extract the now renamed ZIP file to a new folder.
4. Navigate to new folder\ppt\slides
5. This folder contains an XML file for each of your slides, in sequence.
6. Find the slide that contains the media and the media bookmark you want to edit.
7. Open in in a text editor (preferably one that can deal with XML files).
8. Search for your bookmark name (usually something like “Bookmark 1”).
9. You'll find something like this:
   

   <p14:bmk name="Bookmark 1" time="4696.44"/>
   

   
   
10. The time attribute is self-explanatory, although on a cursory search online I could not find documentation about this attribute. So, I believe the value is in milliseconds.
11. Edit as you like it and save the file.
12. Re-ZIP the folder and rename the ZIP file to the presentation extension.
13. Open the edited file in PowerPoint.
14. Enjoy.

If you explore the folder structure you can see that you can change the media file, without losing the bookmark either. 😉