Timing is an essential part of delivering an effective presentation. Using time effectively can be the difference between an engaging presentation or one that causes death by PowerPoint. Fortunately, PowerPoint provides a feature to rehearse your timing. Rehearsing your time can not only make you a better presenter but also give you insights regarding how to start a presentation and end a presentation.
What is the Rehearse Timings Feature in PowerPoint?
Rehearse Timings is a PowerPoint feature that allows you to practice presenting your PowerPoint presentation while recording the time spent on each slide. This function can be useful for a number of reasons, such as:
- Timing presentations according to a set time limit.
- Ensuring smooth transitions between PowerPoint slides.
- Eliminating uncertainty related to slide duration.
- Helping presenters refine slide delivery and pacing.
Benefits of Using Rehearse Timings Feature in PowerPoint
There can be a number of benefits to using the rehearsal timings feature in PowerPoint.
Improved Presentation Skills and Flow
Rehearsing slides can help maintain a presentation flow, improve presentation skills, and give a professional outlook to the way you present a topic before an audience.
Anticipating Audience Needs
Rehearsing slides opens your thoughts to the need for clarity to anticipate questions and potential queries that need to be addressed in more detail to avoid confusing your audience. Unlike impromptu or unrehearsed presentations, you can avoid acting bewildered due to unforeseen queries or issues in your slides that might need to be fixed.
Maintaining Consistency in Presentation Delivery
By timing your slides and managing presentation flow, you can maintain consistency in the way you deliver slides. Rehearsing can help avoid filler words and stuttering and improve how you present a topic by choosing appropriate words and terminologies to make your case before the audience.
Time Management and Automatic Slide Progression
The Rehearse Timings feature also lets you automatically time slides on PowerPoint based on your rehearsal, ensuring better time management and automatic slide progression.
Enhanced Confidence
You can enhance your confidence by timing slides, managing time, and benefitting from automatic slide progression based on your rehearsed slides. Knowing about these minor details can boost confidence, as the certainty around the planned aspects of your presentation can give you a sense of calm. Hence, you can be more confident presenting your slides by eliminating uncertainty.
How to Use the Rehearse Timings Feature
To show the process for rehearsing slides using the Rehearse Timings feature in PowerPoint, we will use the Saas Business Overview PowerPoint Template, which is a part of the set of business-themed PowerPoint templates and Google Slides templates available at SlideModel.
Step 1 – Start Rehearse Timings: To use the Rehearse Timings feature, go to Slide Show -> Rehearse Timings under the Set Up group in the Ribbon menu.
Step 2 – Practice Your Slides: This will open the presentation in Slide Show mode and start recording the time spent on slides. Use the timer to rehearse your slides and navigate through the slides at your natural pace. Use Pause to stop and reflect on your timing as needed.
Step 3 – Adjust Pacing: Adjust your pacing while rehearsing your slides to make the most out of your practice session. Once rehearsed, save the timings for your session. After considering the required time for each slide, play the slideshow again, and rehearse again until you are satisfied with your pacing. You can choose to keep the timing at the end of the session when ending your slideshow. Select Yes to automatically add the timing to your slides.
How to Automatically and Manually Time Slides
Automatically Timing Slides: To automatically time slides, start Rehearse Timings via the Slideshow tab and practice your slides. When ending the slideshow, click Yes to save the time to automatically time your slides.
Edit Automatic Timing for Slides: To edit the automatic time set via Rehearse Timings or to set a manual time, go to the Transitions tab and edit the After duration by adding a time. This section also enables other changes to the slide timings, including enabling or disabling slide advancement on mouse click and selecting a sound for slide advancement.
Timing Individual Slides: To time individual slides, go to View -> Slide Sorter -> Transitions -> Advance Slide After, select a slide in Slide Sorter view and adjust timings via Timings group. While you can also perform this task in Normal view, using Slide Sorter view can be helpful to get an overview of your slides in a format similar to large thumbnails while adjusting time individually.
You can learn more about timing slides from our tutorial about how to set time duration to switch slides in PowerPoint.
Manually Timing Slides: To manually time slides, you can switch from automatic to manual timing via Slide Show -> Set Up Slide Show -> Manually.
Common Issues and Troubleshooting
When using the Rehearse Timings feature in PowerPoint, you may encounter a few common issues. Below is a list of common issues end users face using the Rehearse Timings feature and troubleshooting tips to resolve them.
PowerPoint Not Showing Timer
If PowerPoint does not show the onscreen timer, ensure your system has switched to Slide Show mode. If something is preventing PowerPoint from doing this or you cannot see the timer despite switching successfully to Slide Show mode, restart PowerPoint.
PowerPoint Switches to Blank Screen
Sometimes, PowerPoint might switch to a blank screen when you launch Rehearse Timings. This can occur due to an issue with PowerPoint or when your system might be unable to launch Slide Show mode due to a lack of available resources. You can fix this issue by restarting PowerPoint or closing additional programs to free up system resources so that PowerPoint can be used efficiently. Restarting the system might resolve this problem. If this persistent issue affects PowerPoint or other Office apps, you should reinstall Microsoft Office apps on your system.
Rehearse Timings Not Saving Slide Time
If your rehearsed time isn’t saved and your slides aren’t automatically getting timed, make sure that you click Yes at the end of a session to save the changes. You can also make edits to time via Transitions -> Advance Slide.
Slide Advancement Too Quick for Some Slides
Since automatically saving slide time might lead to some slides moving on too quickly due to how you have rehearsed them, you can edit individual slides via the Normal or Slide Sorter view. To do this, go to the Transitions tab and adjust the time for the selected slide from the Timing group. This can help determine the time allocated for each slide by manually allocating the required time.
How to Use Rehearse with Coach Feature to Get Feedback
Rehearse with Coach is a timing and feedback feature in PowerPoint. It enables timing slides and provides active feedback during and after the rehearsal to improve presentation skills.
Step 1 – Enable Rehearse with Coach: To receive AI-generated feedback, enable the coaching feature in PowerPoint via Slide Show -> Rehearse with Coach.
Step 2 – Start Rehearsing: Click Start Rehearsing to begin timing your slides with AI-generated feedback. For Live feedback, make sure that the Show real-time feedback option is enabled before you start rehearsing.
Step 3 – Make Adjustments Based on Feedback: Rehearse with Coach provides real-time feedback (if enabled) with suggestions regarding your pacing (e.g., too fast or slow), use of filler words, inclusive language, repetitions, and suggestions on monotone speech. This can help you use words and pacing best suited for an engaging presentation.
Step 4 – Make Improvements with Review Rehearsal Report: Once the slideshow ends, you will receive a Review Rehearsal Report. This report will summarize the time spent, words per minute, slides practiced, pacing, pitch, repetitive language, originality, and inclusivity. Based on this feedback, you can improve and practice your presentation until you are satisfied with the results.
FAQs
No, Rehearse Timing only records the time spent on each slide. To record narration, use the Record Slide Show option instead.
You can restart the rehearsal any time by pressing the Esc key or clicking Yes when prompted to save or discard the recorded timings.
Rehearse Timing is available in most modern versions of PowerPoint, including Office 2013, 2016, 2019, and Microsoft 365.
Go to the Slide Show tab, click Set Up Slide Show, and select Manually under Advance Slides to disable the automatic timings.
PowerPoint continues counting time while you pause, so any long pauses will be included in the slide timing.
Yes, go to the Slide Sorter View, select a slide, and delete its timing from the Transitions tab under Advance Slide.
Final Words
Rehearsing slides can be an excellent way to refine your presentation skills, manage pacing, and prepare for an upcoming presentation. Using the Rehearse Timings feature in PowerPoint, you can adjust your pacing and automatically time your slides to ensure you spend only designated time on each slide for better time management. If you want to include visuals to keep track of time, there are different methods by which you can add timer to PowerPoint.
Time added automatically using the Rehearse Timings feature can be edited from the Transitions tab via the Timing group. You can also use the options in this group to edit time for slides and add transitions to switch between slides. To advance slides manually, go to Slide Show -> Set Up Slide Show -> Manually to switch from automatic to manual slide advancement.
Other than Rehearse Timings, Rehearse with Coach is another handy feature in PowerPoint that provides real-time feedback about how to present your slides best. You can get instant AI-powered feedback when practicing your presentation delivery and a comprehensive report highlighting the time, pacing, words per minute, use of filler words and exclusive language, and other vital information to improve your timing and presentation skills.
