Countdown Timers in PowerPoint

Timers are great tools for making sure that people recognise how time is passing when they are engaged in a task.

The idea here is that the slide explains the instructions for the task and the timer indicates how far they should ideally have progressed with the task at each point in time, and how much time they have left. The image on the left shows an example.

Such slide-based timers can be used in both physical meetings (via a projector or screen) and in virtual meetings (by sharing a PowerPoint presentation from your desktop).

There are two main ways in which this can be achieved:

Both work well, but have the limitation that the timer only applies to the slide it is on. And skipping forward and backward a slide will reset the timer.  If having visible time control for the presentation overall is important, it is better to keep that timer outside of Powerpoint. Instead, situate the timer in the meeting software (e.g. Zoom or Teams) or in a separate window over the shared screen (click on the relevant link to see how).

However, where the visible time control is slide specific, PowerPoint based timers are an ideal option. They start automatically when you need them, and they are integral to what is going on.

There is a wide selection of GIF based Timers that can simply be copied, pasted, resized, and positioned on your slides. This is by far the easiest and quickest option for including a timer in a slide.  Simply:

If you are presenting your PowerPoint via SlideShow and a shared screen, you will probably have noticed that when you move your focus to anything else on your desktop, any animation, video or timer pauses until you give the focus back to the slide show. This can be very frustrating when you are trying to run a meeting. However, there is any easy way round this which is explained in this post: Working in Two PowerPoint Windows

Another alternative is to use your PowerPoint to add your timer to a virtual video background.

Animations can be of several types. The majority tend to be built around disappearing segments. In each case it is a matter of animating them to move, appear or disappear at a certain time period ‘after previous’.

To understand this better, click on one of the options below and take it apart to see how it works – you will need the animation pane visible in PowerPoint.

Once you understand how the animations work, clicking an example timer image above will download the PowerPoint file for that particular timer, which you can edit for your own purposes.