Rehearsing Your Timings

Another way you can record the ideal timing for your slides is to use the Rehearse Timings feature. This feature enables you to go through your presentation as a slide show, manually advancing each slide after you ve had enough time to read everything. Start the rehearsal by clicking the Rehearse Timings tool on the Slide Sorter toolbar. Your presentation begins, and a small Rehearsal toolbar appears in the upper left corner of your screen, as shown here:

The Slide Time value begins immediately, as it tracks the seconds you want the slide to display. When you click to advance to the next slide, PowerPoint records the time value, and sets the Slide Time value back to 00:00 for the next slide.

Caution  

Here s something tricky about the Rehearse Timings feature: If you have added Animation Schemes to an individual slide, each of the elements on that slide ” such as the title, the bullet text, and any charts or graphics ”might have individual animation effects applied. For those slides, you need to click Next on the Rehearsal toolbar to play the animated effect, and you might need to click Next several times before moving on to the next slide. Don t sit and wait an inordinately long time for an element to show up on an animated slide ”PowerPoint is waiting for you to click Next, and those waiting periods will distort your timings.

At the end of the show, PowerPoint tells you how long the presentation is, and asks whether you d like to keep the timings as you rehearsed them. If you click Yes, the timings you rehearsed will override any timings you entered in the Advance Slide area of the Slide Transition task pane. If you click No, the timings you entered manually will be retained.