Of course, you can create a YouTube Video and embed, but often a short, animated image is a quicker way to get the point across – to wit, the GIF above showing my PowerPoint visualisation. When you write a lot of blogs, animated GIF can often be your friend. If you’re wanting to give this a go, then I’ve uploaded my PPTX file that you can get a copy of and tweak the settings here: Set the animation on the top circle to Wheel and then choose your time preference. Problem solved (albeit, requiring delving into sub menus of PowerPoint! Howard also offered a great suggestion for the second timer visualisation:Īnother nice way to do it is to create 2 circles the same size (like a clock face) and place them on top of each other. For example, if you wanted the slide indicator to show for 5mins then you’d choose 300 seconds: Select the “Timing” tab that opens and then you have the “Duration” that you can set any value you wish.Find the object in the Animation Pane that you’re animating and then from the drop down arrow to the right, choose “Effect Options”.Open the “animation pane” (this was the key I was missing).Add the wipe animation (from left) under the effect options.Add the rectangle across the top of your slide in the colour of your choosing (red in my instance).The trick, it turns out, is to not use the ribbon for animation settings, but to instead drill down: Whilst encouraging people to keep to 1 minute per slide might be a good thing in many contexts, the reality is this would be too short.įortunately, I had recently attended a work presentation from Howard Gold from Three Cat Presentations and I pinged him asking if he knew any work arounds. The problem I encountered was that the ribbon only shows a maximum of 59 seconds for an animation to occur. Both of these were easily achieved using simple animation that I got the idea from on this post.

As you can see in the above GIF, the PowerPoint Side has two visual cues – a timer progress bar across the top of the slide and a countdown ‘clock’ at the bottom right.

Add countdown timer to powerpoint slide