Are you willing to display a live and advancing clock in your PowerPoint presentation or slide show? Well, let’s be honest. There is no native way in PowerPoint to accomplish this.

The user can only insert the current date and time on the slide that will be updated each time the user opens the presentation. But nothing more afterwards. It will not update during the show and that is what the user wants with a clock, isn’t it?

Display a live clock

PresentationPoint is the worldwide reference when it comes to dynamic and data driven presentations. A new product named Dynamic TIME was recently launched and it contains a PowerPoint add-on to display the current time or current clock in a PowerPoint presentation or running slide show. PresentationPoint teamed up with PresentationLoad to build this solution.

PresentationLoad is internationally the market leading online shop for PowerPoint presentations, Charts and Designs. Their team of 20 PowerPoint experts, communication pros and designers is specialized to develop and promote PowerPoint slides for various business presentations.

This joined effort resulted in this new Dynamic TIME component that delivers a PowerPoint add-on to update the clock in real time but also a professional template with some 40 slides that the user can use right away. After installation of the Dynamic TIME setup, the user open Microsoft PowerPoint and the  will notice a new menu entry in the PowerPoint menu. See this new Dynamic ELEMENTS option.

Open Time Task Pane

Click the Dynamic ELEMENTS option to open its sub menu. The user will find the TIME component listed here.

Now start with a new presentation or open an existing one and click the TIME button to open the Dynamic TIME task pane.

Select now an existing text box or draw a new text box on the slide and have that one selected. At the TIME task pane  set the mode to Clock to instruct the component that this text box will not hold the normal static text as usual in PowerPoint, but that this text box will display a live clock from now on. When the user set the clock mode, TIME is copying the current time into the text box.

Note that the user is now working in design mode. The user is setting up the slides and the user is not running in slide show mode yet. In design mode, the clock will not update automatically. Only when the user hits the F5 to start the slide show, then the live clock controls will start updating.

Clock Options

When the user looks more in detail at the task pane, the user will see a few options the user can choose from for this clock shape and choose format.  There is the long time format and the short time format. And the user can customize the format for the users for whatever syntax that the user would like to see. The user can choose to display seconds only for example. Select the desired format or select a custom format. With this last option, the user can set the formatting options at the custom text box control. For more information on the custom formatting options and its possible values, visit the Microsoft documentation.

Time zones

When the user is doing business internationally or the user needs to display clocks of different time zones, then the user can change the default local time zone to another time zone. Open the time zone combo box and select ‘(UTC-10:00) Hawaii’ to display the local time of Honolulu.

On all slides automatically

The user can also choose to insert a live clock for all slides of the presentation. To do so click View and then Slide Master.

Then choose a slide in the master layout and insert a text box with clock options there. Click Close Master View to go back to the normal slide.

Start the show

Now start the slide show and the Dynamic TIME component will update the clocks in real time, second by second. That is what a clock is for!

Some sample slides of the template included