Powerpoint 10 Minute Timer

[Ophelia Gurin]

Ifyou want a countdown clock for tracking longer durations, like a 15 minute coffee break (I like the Lavazza Super Crema coffee blend!), your best bet might be to insert one of the PowerPoint timers available as add ins.

Timers are very helpful for presenters. A timer can be useful not only for rehearsing a presentation but also during the presentation session. There are some presentations that need to adhere strictly to the time and often the time limit is somewhere around 15-20 minutes. Having a stopwatch or timer can be crucial on these occasions. Timers can help to fit your presentation within the delivery time and help manage your slides effectively to present your ideas within the designated time.

Here are a few recommended widgets and tips that you can use to set timer for 15 minutes presentation from now or according to some other desired time range. For the purpose of this post we have used PowerPoint for demonstrating the use of PowerPoint timers.

The Google Timer widget offers a very easy way to set a timer online to any specific time from now. It is also useful for presenters requiring to make activities during a presentation and configure a timer bomb in your PowerPoint slides.

There are a couple of add-ins available for Microsoft PowerPoint that can embed a timer on the screen during the presentation slideshow. We have already reviewed one of them in the past, the TM Timer. Using TM Timer you can add a countdown to the slideshow. This add-in is quite easy to use and is more than just a countdown timer. You can configure the timer to display:

Note: If you are using PowerPoint 2013, TM Timer tab might not show up by default. To reveal the tab go to File -> Options -> Add-Ins. now, select PowerPoint Add-Ins from the Manage drop down menu and click Go. Once done, click Add New and select TM Timer PPAM. By default you can find the PPAM file via: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\AddIns.

To ensure that you can keep an eye on the time without looking at your watch every now and then and to perfectly time slides, you can create a countdown timer for each slide. While you can always switch a slide automatically in PowerPoint and also use add-ins like PowerPoint Timeline Control to time slides; sometimes you might need to spend more time on a slide than you might have planned. In such a case if your slide randomly changes, it can be quite embarrassing for you. Therefore, setting a timer to alert yourself might be a better idea. Here is how you can do this.

Step 1: Add a shape for your timer. In the first step, select a shape to create your timer. You can pick shapes by going to Insert -> Shapes. To demonstrate this process we will use the Oval shape in PowerPoint.

Step 2: Stylize the Shape. Place the shape at a convenient location on the slide. Somewhere it might seem unobtrusive. Once done, select the shape and use formatting options to stylize it. You can pick various colors for your shape, as well as turn it into a 3D shape.

Step 4: Set Animation Duration. Now, select your added shape and go to Animations -> Timing -> Duration and select a time for the animation. From here, you can time the animation to play out according to a set time frame. So, if you want to spend 1 minute per slide, you can animate the circle animation to complete in 1 minute.

Using this easy method you can add a circle to each slide and time it to load with the Wheel effect accordingly to the amount of time you are willing to spend on the slide. As the circle completes, you will get a hint to move on.

The below screenshot shows the circle animation playing out in Slide Show mode. We set the animation to 1 minute to play out, so the circle is completed in a minutes time. Making such a timer can prevent you from getting embarrassed with automatically switching slides, since you can control when your slides are switched and get an alert when your designated time for the slide is complete.

You can also time the circle to complete differently for each slide, e.g. 1 minute for the first slide 5 minutes for the second and so on. The point is you can add and animate a circle for each slide and time it according to the time you have designated for each slide. You can also play around with shapes and animation effects to create custom timers.

Since my John Jay colleague Kathleen Collins wrote about using active learning strategies in library "one-shot" sessions, I've been experimenting with games and hands-on activities to keep students engaged in the material. Typically, I cover library research basics in the sessions I teach: breaking a research question down into keywords (this is hard for freshmen!) and finding books/articles.

Heads Up! is an iOS/Android app from Ellen DeGeneres (et al.) based on the old game Password, wherein the player who's "it" must guess a word they can't see based on hints from their teammates. It's a great way to get students thinking about synonyms and related words for keywords, and it absolutely starts the class session off with a high energy level.

Download my PowerPoint slides for adapted Heads Up! (adapt further and reuse freely)

(This version includes different timer gifs on each page. I did this because sometimes Powerpoint glitches out when "restarting" the same gif on a different page.)

I ask for 2 volunteers from each side of the room. Both volunteers can guess when it's their team's turn (so that they don't feel so alone at the front of the room, especially when they're not doing well). Both teams get 2 rounds, meaning the game lasts around 4 minutes total (plus some banter in between). Usually, students get between 2 and 7 words. Note that these are general words, not library-y words. Something easy and low-barrier to engage students from the get-go. So far, my favorite moment has been for the keyword "Chiptole," for which half the classroom devolved into students shouting "Bowl! Bowl! BOWL! BOWL!" at their flustered classmate. ("Cereal? Spoon? Plate? Salad?? Soup??") Probably the most laughter that's ever occurred on my watch.

I swear by this activity! Students absolutely get the connection between Heads Up! and the next part of my presentation, in which they pick keywords out of their actual research questions and find synonyms and related words, then trade worksheets with a classmate. (Warn them about trading ahead of time, if you're going to ask them to do this.) This keyword-gathering activity, too, is inspired by that LOEX article.

If all you want to do is set the value of your Texbox to count down from 30 Minutes. You will first need to change your timer interval to something smaller than 30Minutes. Something like timeX.Interval = 1000; which will fire every second. then set up your event like so:

Your code will only get one event fired, once the 30 minutes has passed. In order to keep updating your UI continuously you'll have to make the events more frequent and add a condition inside the event handler to tell the count-down to stop once 30 minutes has passed.

I have done a lot of research over the last few years on creating a timer that can count down or up on a slide or even a project. Since what I wanted was something at the slide level for activities or games, I wanted something simple that I could replicate.

I started with this article in the community by Paul Alders Timer to use in Storyline. This led me in several directions including the article by Swift Elearning Services. This last article is very comprehensive, but it was a lot more than what I wanted. It is a great idea for a timer that does hours, minutes, and seconds. You can also use the Quiz timer in Storyline.

I had also taken a course (on Udemy) from Alexander Salas where he used images on layers and had them appear with triggers and variables. That process works with multiple layers but was not as simple as I wanted.

I realized I wanted a process that would work on only one slide and one or two layers. It would probably also use variables. At first, I decided to use the multiple layer process putting a number on each layer that appears on the base layer as the slide runs. Each layer was only one second so I started with 5 as a test. What I liked about this approach is I only used triggers to show each layer.

I liked the approach from Swift Elearning Services using a variable to count the time. I created a layer and set it for one second. I created a variable titled Timer_Down. I set a trigger to Show Layer with the timer when the timeline starts.

The triggers on the loop layer are the most important. One trigger subtracts a number each time the timeline starts. Another trigger hides the layer, the another trigger shows the layer and finally a trigger shows an ending layer when the count down reaches zero.

All of the above approaches are functional, no doubt, but not nearly as precise - any slowdowns or frameskips do not count against the timer, time required to load the new slide is not taken into account etc.

They work fairly well for short timing interactions (0 to 10 seconds) but become inaccurate for larger ones (like 1, 2, or 15 minute timers, or even longer). For that you will need to resort to Javascript, using the setInterval method

I like it. Alexander Salas uses a similar object and uses a trigger to count the motion. You must be using the same concept. Your timer image is very well done. For a game or activity I would not use something that large but I like what you have done.

I use the following JavaScript for simple countdown timers. In this example the counter counts down from 10 seconds. If you want to change the countdown duration, you simply change the var t value. Note the time is expressed in milliseconds so if you wanted to change the countdown to 1 minute, y var t would = 60000

Just one thing I would like to find out. I am using the .js your shared and it worked great. But I have 3 quizzes and would like to know how you reset the time. Cause it just continues counting down from the previous .js

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