1) You can use hyperlinks to make your presentation interactive, by going to a specific slide depending on the answer selected
2) You can use a PowerPoint add-in such as PowerQuizPoint to add quiz slides to your presentation
3) If the presentation is for use online, you can use a presentation platform such as Brainshark to generate questions that can be used in a variety of ways.

Depending on your usage, some of these options may prove more useful to you than others – if you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get back in touch!

Curiously, PowerPoint 2010 doesn’t provide a default ‘play audio’ function when you add a sound that you want to play over several slides. You have to add this in manually.

You are right to use the ‘Play across all slides’ function. When you have selected this, you then need to use the Animations tab on the ribbon to add an animation effect to start the sound file playing. To do this, select the sound object and choose to add an animation. You will find that you have a series of new ‘Media’ animations that you can add. Choose the ‘Play’ animation and, as per a normal animation, move this to the point in the animation timeline that you want the sound to play. You can choose to start it automatically (no clicks) or on a click. The sound should then start playing on your first slide and continue across the rest of the slides in your presentation.

The following tutorial based on PowerPoint 2007 may also help as it is very similar to PowerPoint 2010 (about 3:30 into the video) – http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-training/multimedia-presentations/inserting-audio-powerpoint-2007-2/

Richard

If I set it to start ‘automatically’ it plays fine when i view the slideshow. However, the music stops when i move to the next slide.

So I changed it to ‘play across all slides’ and as soon as I do this, the sound fails to play in slideshow mode. So I put it back to start ‘automatically’ and the sound works fine.

I thought i’d get around this by getting the sound to start ‘automatically’, then go to effect options and getting it to stop after 99 slides. However, as soon as I type in ’99′ and press ok, then i find that in the playback ribbon the ‘automatically’ as disappeared and once again, the sound won’t play.

It’s so annoying! Hope you can help.

You’re right. The slide master is what you need here. If you access the slide master (‘View’ tab on the ribbon > ‘Slide Master’). In PowerPoint 2010 there are usually several versions of the master slide, so select all of them. Then use the ‘Transitions’ tab on the ribbon and select a Fade transition for all of the slides.

Now, every new slide that is created will have a Fade transition as default and has to be manually changed,

Richard

I am preparing a template for others to add content to but require the ‘Fade’ transition as the default so that when they add slides, the transition is already defined.

Is there a setting where this option can be actioned – eg the slide master?

Thanks,

It sounds like your music may be stopping the slides transitioning, but just to check, you need to make sure that all clicks are removed from the ‘Animation Pane’ that appears on the right hand side of the slide (accessed through the Animations tab) and that the ‘Advance Slide’ ‘On Mouse Click’ option box is deselected (which is accesed through the Transitions tab). If both of these are fine, then the third thing to do is check how your music is set to play.

If you select your music file and then the Playback audio tool tab on the ribbon, on the right you have a drop down menu with ‘Start’ options. Default is ‘On Click’, however, you need to select ‘Play across slides’ to allow the slides to transition.

The following two video tutorials will probably help, particularly the one about inserting audio (at about 2:45),

Richard

Inserting Audio – http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-training/multimedia-presentations/inserting-audio-powerpoint-2007-2/

Creating Self-running Presentations – http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-training/multimedia-presentations/self-running-presentations-powerpoint-2007/

The PowerPoint 2010 viewer can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13

However, you may also need the SP1 update version from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26620

Sorry, I don’t have a non-PowerPoint 2010 PC to test this from, so I can’t tell whether you need both or just the second one. Hope that this helps,

Richard

“It’s possible that they’ve purchased the release version but still have the Technical Preview installed, which only included a subset of the transitions. You may want to recommend that they uninstall Office, and re-install using CD or download link from Office.com.”

I hope this helps!

When you return to a slide that’s already played, PowerPoint remembers that you’ve been there, done that, so it shows you the slide as it was in its final state before you moved along to another slide in the presentation(it could be any slide). It’s a nice feature really, but I can NOT find it in the 2010 its already there in the 2007.

Any ideas?

The time taken for the slide transition is added to the time indicated in the ‘transition after’ timing section. So, if you set a slide to transition after 2 seconds and have a ‘fast’ speed transition to the next slide, taking 0.5 seconds, then the slide will transition after 2.5 seconds (2 + 0.5). It may also be worth noting that the slide will not transition until all animation effects have played through, so if you have 3 seconds worth of animation and set the slide to transition after 2 seconds, it will only transition once all the animation is complete, meaning the total slide time would be 3.5 seconds (3 + 0.5).

Unforetunately, there isn’t a way to embed transitions native to PowerPoint 2010 into your file so that they play in previous versions of PowerPoint. They will usually change to the closest standard transition, often a simple fade.

However, you can download the latest version of Microsoft’s PowerPoint Viewer, which does support PowerPoint 2010 transitions. You would have to install the new PowerPoint 2010 Viewer on whatever machine you are presenting on, but it takes only a few seconds and is simple to do. You can download the latest version of the PowerPoint Viewer from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cb9bf144-1076-4615-9951-294eeb832823 or search for PowerPoint 2010 Viewer on the Microsoft website. This will then allow you to run PowerPoint 2010 transitions on any computer, when playing the slide show through the Viewer software.