Have you ever heard of the term kiosk slides in PowerPoint? Well, maybe not because I can't remember if this is just something I made up in my own little brain, or if it is actually a thing. I guess the more appropriate word for it would be a custom slideshow. And I want to share with you today one way that I love to use custom slideshows whenever I'm giving a presentation to an audience.
That might be in an auditorium. It might just be in a meeting to my colleagues. This is one of those little tips that nobody really talks about but can make a huge difference when it comes to grabbing people's attention right from the get go. So, let's dive in. Now, I've got a PowerPoint presentation just here.
This is just one of my presentations that I use for different webinars. You can see here it's about cleaning data in Excel. So I've got a few slides down here and just above you can see that I've got four slides that currently are hidden. So let's just select these first of all. And let's right click and let's unhide these slides.
Now what exactly are these four slides and what is their purpose? Well, these four slides basically contain pieces of information. They could also contain fun things like facts or funny images. Really, your imagination is all that's holding you back here. Just make sure that they are appropriate for the situation that you're going to present them in.
So you can see here that I have a slide here. The first one is just telling people how they can connect with me. I'm giving them a little QR code so they can connect to my Linktree and my LinkedIn and all of that good stuff. We then have another slide that just gives them a little fact. So it's a did you know fact.
Monday blues are real. We then have another Did You Know Fact about astronauts and their workdays. And then we have a little session checklist slide where I basically introduce myself and just get them to check that they're ready and prepared for the session. As I said, you can have as many of these slides as you like, and you can put whatever you want on them.
Now, what is the purpose of these? Well, I like to have these just scrolling around as people are joining the meeting. So there's always that sort of dead period of time where you're set up, you're ready to go with your presentation and you're waiting for different people to arrive to the meeting room.
And what normally happens is people turn up, they just sit there, it's a little bit awkward, they get on their phone, they start scrolling. You don't really have their focus until you actually start the presentation. And what we're trying to do is alleviate that and bring people into the room straight away.
So what these could do is kind of help with that and give people something interesting to look at, something to think about. You could even put questions up there that you want them to think about before the session begins. So I will generally have these four slides scrolling around automatically whilst people are walking into the meeting.
Now if I was just to run the presentation, to get these to move on I'd have to press the arrow key or click my mouse or whatnot. I want these to scroll automatically in their own little custom show. So we're going to go up to slideshow. We're going to go into custom slideshow and custom shows. And we're going to create a new custom show.
And then you can choose which slides you want to add into your custom show. Now I only want the first four. So let's select them and click on Add. Now you can reorder these, do whatever you like. I'm fine with them how they are. Let's give our custom show a name. I'm just going to call this My Name and Intro.
And click on OK and close. So now we effectively have another little slideshow within our main PowerPoint slide deck. Now once we've set up our custom slideshow, we want these four slides within this slideshow to effectively scroll through automatically without me having to click anything. So maybe I want each slide to show for five seconds.
This is where we need to rehearse timings. So we're going to go to rehearse timings just here. Notice in the top corner we have a little counter. So this is how long it's going to stay on this slide. So we're going to get to five and I'm going to press to move on to the next one. So we'll do each one for five seconds.
And I'm probably going to cut this part of the video so you're not having to sit here through all of these slides. And then this is the last one that we have. And then once we're happy, we can press escape. Do I want to save the slide timings? Yes, I do. So I've only done it for those first four. So now we need to go into setup slideshow, and this is where we can choose our custom slideshow from the dropdown.
Deb's intro, and I want to use my timings. The other option I'm going to change here is loop continuously until escape, because I don't want it to just loop through four slides once and then stop. I want it just to carry on going until I'm ready to start the main presentation. Let's click on Okay, so now let's imagine that I'm in my presentation, people are starting to arrive, I can run the slideshow, it's basically going to run my custom intro slideshow, and every five seconds it's going to loop through those different slides.
You can see the next one is up on the screen there and I haven't touched anything, and then it will move on to the next one, and then when it gets to the end, it's just going to loop back round to the beginning. So, as I said, this is great just to have up on the screen behind you as people are arriving to make things slightly more interesting and get their focus in the right spot.
Now, a little tip here, because this used to stump me. When you're ready to actually start your presentation and you press escape, you might think, OK, so I want to go down here and I want to start from this slide now. So if I run my slideshow, it's just going to go back and start running through your custom slideshow again.
You need to remember to go back into set up slideshow and change show slides from your custom intro to all. Then it will allow you to select whatever slides you want, and you can start from that point. So don't get stuck in that loop of not being able to get out of your custom slideshow.
I love doing this. Go to town with your imagination, make things nice and interesting for your audience.
