Creating a self-running PowerPoint, as Microsoft calls it, can be a great addition to your company’s booth at conventions or industry-wide conferences. By featuring photos, infographics and key points in a continuous loop, PowerPoint becomes an effective communication tool to inform others about your company, its goals, and your products or services.
Auto-playing presentations are also great for employee training, meetings where the speaker is absent, and reaching remote clients or customers. Microsoft provides easy steps to turn your PowerPoint into an autoplay presentation.
There are several options for creating a PowerPoint presentation automatically. All of these can be accessed under the Slide Show tab.
Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show
There are three options under this menu:
If you don’t want your viewers to have access to when the slideshow starts and stops, select the third option. The Loop Continuously option underneath will be automatically selected.
Experts estimate that there are about 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day!
Before you begin recording your presentation, it’s important to set the slide time using the rehearsal toolbar. This will give you an idea of how long each slide will run before advancing to the next one. It will also allow you to practice your presentation and understand how long the runtime will be. Like setting up the slide show, this window can be accessed via the Slide Show tab.
Slide Show > Rehearse Timings
The recording window allows users to advance to the next slide, pause the presentation, view the current slide’s time, restart the recording for a slide and view the total runtime of the presentation.
After recording the last slide, PowerPoint will ask whether you want to keep the slide timings or not.
Once your slide timings are set, you can record your slide show.
Navigate to Slide Show > Record Slide Show to begin your recording. Click End Show and save your file once you are done recording. After saving, your presentation is ready to be sent to clients, customers or played at your convention or conference booth.
Here are some quick tips to check for before recording your presentation:
Autoplay allows you to keep a PowerPoint presentation running. In typical PowerPoint presentations, presenters click from slide to slide manually using a clicker or spacebar on a keyboard.
Luckily, PowerPoint autoplay allows users to set up their slides, so they automatically change. That way, they can focus on their presentation without interruptions. There are options to have slides timed to music or voiceovers and make each slide the same length.
You can use autoplay in any number of situations where a continuous, unattended loop is called for, such as photos at an event, displaying information at a trade show booth or using the changing slides as a visual cue while rehearsing a timed presentation.
Autoplay is great for several uses, from delivering announcements throughout a company’s office or a school, to giving speeches and presentations at conventions or work. Presenters can rehearse the timings of the slides and then present without worry. Here are some of the reasons why someone may use PowerPoint’s autoplay features: