Preparing the Slide Show

Setting Up Slide Timings

Although most people prefer to have control over when one slide transitions to another, there are times where this is not practical, especially if you need to do a lot of talking during the presentation. PowerPoint allows you to set automatic timings to determine how long each slide will display. This is done in Slide Sorter View.

To set the transition and timing for a particular slide, click on the slide, then click on the Transition button at the left side of the Slide Sorter toolbar. In the dialog box below, there are a series of transitions. Transitions are how one slide is turned into another, similar to changing camera shots in a sports program on TV. Some examples include: fly from left, dissolve, wipe up, blinds vertical, and checkerboard across. Select the transition you like and set it for slow, medium, or fast speed.

In this dialog box, you can also choose to advance on a mouse click, automatically after a certain number of designated seconds, or both. PowerPoint 2000 also allows you to play a sound from your computer when you advance. The transition can be applied to that slide only or to all slides. Here is the first slide with a transition set.

Notice how there is a transition icon below the slide 1, along with the number of seconds. Clicking the transition icon will show the type of transition. <Click here to see a video demo of this.> (201K) We will now set transitions and times for the remaining slides. You can hold down the [SHIFT] key to click and select multiple slides, or hit [CTRL] + [A] to select all slides. For this example, we will set all slides with a random transition and 5 second timing.