Introduction

Use our Dynamic TIME add-on and presentation to create your own PowerPoint countdown. PowerPoint countdowns are dynamic shapes for your slides, where you set a specific target or countdown date and time. Countdowns are great for counting down till New Year, for the opening of a new shop, the launch of a new product, and so on.

Count down to your target date with your viewers. Choose what to display; number of days, number of minutes, number of seconds and so on. Once that the target date is reached, your countdown slide is hidden and the slideshow jumps to a specific slide.

When you would search the internet for a countdown slideshow, then the only thing you will find, are instructions to display a presentation with a 10 minutes countdown. You will be instructed to set up a presentation with 10 slides. A slide per countdown minute, like 10, 9, 8, 7 and a slide display duration set to 60 seconds. That is a possibility for small and static countdowns. This Dynamic TIME implementation is much more dynamic and serve for longer countdown periods.

Countdown Sample Presentation

For this article, let’s use a sample countdown presentation where we promote the opening of a new hotel. The customer wants to display the total number of seconds till the official opening.

Using Dynamic TIME

After installation of the Dynamic TIME add-on, you will have a new Dynamic ELEMENTS added to your Microsoft PowerPoint installation. Click the Dynamic ELEMENTS menu item and then click the TIME button.

This opens a panel on the right, with all the Dynamic TIME properties. The Dynamic TIME add-on allows you do use dynamic shapes or controls on your slide to display current time, current date, countdown or time counters.

Select the text box that will host the dynamic countdown on the slide.

Set the Mode to Count down.

Set the date to our target date. Optionally, you can set the time too.

At the Display combobox, choose Total seconds.

An optional setting, is to specify what to do when the target date/time is reached. Here in this sample, we set it to jump to the second slide, to announce the official opening.

Each time, you change a property, you will already see a preview at the text box.

PowerPoint Slideshow with Countdown Controls

Next, start the slideshow. The Dynamic TIME add-on will update the countdown control continuously, based on your settings. Note that the image below is an animated gif with limited images. It does not fully represent the dynamic slideshow as if it would be running as a PowerPoint slideshow.

When the countdown reaches the value 0, at the target date/time, then the slide will move on to the second slide, where we can officially announce the opening of our new hotel.