Microsoft PowerPoint is already a useful productivity tool to deliver slideshows and presentations, but it’s even more versatile than you may realize. PowerPoint offers the functionality for your presentations to loop so that the slideshow restarts right after it ends. Read on to find out how to enable this in your project and why such a feature can be immensely useful in a variety of situations.
How to Loop Your Presentations in PowerPoint
As you make your presentation the way you would like for it to be seen, setting your slideshow up to loop is relatively easy. It mainly involves changing a single setting within PowerPoint.
1. Within the Ribbon at the top of the window, click Slide Show. This will take you to a menu of options for displaying and presenting your slide show.
2. Click Set Up Slide Show in the middle Set Up section. This button will open up a pop-up window of detailed, advanced settings for your presentation.
3. In the Set Up Show window, click Loop continuously until ‘Esc’ in the Show options section.
4. Click OK to apply the change.
5. Preview the presentation using the From Beginning or From Current Slide buttons in the Ribbon to see that the looping works.
As you might notice when you preview the slide show, enabling the setting is only half the battle. While the presentation does return to the first slide after displaying the last one, the slides don’t progress on their own. If you want your slides to loop automatically, you’ll need to set up transitions between each slide.
How to Automatically Loop Your PowerPoint Slides
1. Select the slide you want to apply the transition to if you haven’t already.
2. Click Transitions within the Ribbon. This opens up a variety of options for adding animations when changing from one slide to the next.
3. Choose one of the transitions in the Transition to This Slide section to use with this slide. There are a variety of transition options available, from the subtle to the flashy.
While you can play with each transition to your heart’s content, it’s not necessarily required; you can stick with the default None option or a simple Fade if you’d like.
4. Navigate to the Timing section on the right-hand side of the Ribbon. In order to automate your loop, you’ll need to specify when each slide moves to the next one.
5. Under the Advance Slide heading, click the After: checkbox to enable it.
6. Set a time (in minutes or seconds) by entering one in the text box (currently reading “00:00.00”) or the arrow buttons nearby.
7. Repeat this process for the other slides you have. Alternatively, you can click Apply To All to set the current slide’s transition settings across every slide in the presentation.
8. When you’ve applied the transitions you want, you can preview the presentation again using the From Beginning or From Current Slide buttons in the Slide Show tab of the Ribbon.
In the preview, you’ll see that the slides now transition automatically, and the loop now works without any further interaction. When you need to leave the presentation, press the Esc (escape) key to return to the normal PowerPoint window.
Why Would You Want to Loop a PowerPoint Presentation?
There are a number of reasons why you’d want to run a PowerPoint presentation in a loop, and thus multiple ways this functionality is useful.
You can create a continuous carousel of photos for gatherings with family and friends or a relaxing slideshow of beaches at the end of a stressful day. You can use it to display important information, like rules or schedules, at conferences or conventions.
The integration with the regular transition timings also allows for specialized use cases where you may need to have certain slides displayed longer than others. For example, it can be used to show menu pricing at a kiosk or on a food truck or to offer some entertainment to people waiting in a long line.
Keep Your PowerPoint Presentation Skills in the Loop
Learning how to loop PowerPoint presentations is just one of the many lesser-noticed features of the widely-used tool that can take your slideshows to a new level.
Functionality like this helps keep PowerPoint a versatile, popular program built for a variety of presenting needs. Now, it’s time to put these features to work for you.
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