PowerPoint presentations for digital signage use

When you create a PowerPoint presentation it defaults to expecting the person presenting to click the mouse button to move between the slides.  This is not what we want for digital signage use as it will be used on a computer without someone present to keep clicking the mouse to move between slides.  We also need the presentation to loop at the end automatically and keep looping. 

Presentation Player is quite clever in that when you upload your PowerPoint files to your account, via the online File Manager, it will read your PowerPoint files and if it finds they are not set to automaticlly move between slides and loop at the end, then it sets this for you.  It takes it's default settings from the panel below the File Manager page:

This is useful so that when you send a PowerPoint presentation to one of your digital signage player computers, it will ensure tha the PowerPoint will will play on it's own.

However, this doesn't give you full control over your PowerPoint presentation.  For example, if you had a "quote of the day" slide with two lines of text, then displaying for the default 6 seconds is fine.  However, if the next slide contains a lot more text to read, such as company news, you may want to set this slide to say on screen for 20 seconds instead.  So below are instructions on how to do this in PowerPoint 2016.

Setting PowerPoint presentations to automatically transition and loop in Microsoft PowerPoint 2016

1.  Open PowerPoint 2016 on your computer and open a presentation or choose one of the sample templates, so you have something to work with.  We chose the 'Welcome to PowerPoint' template as our example:

2.  Click on Slide 1 in the left hand menu and then click on the 'Transitions' tab.  Look in the top right for the 'Advance Slide' settings.  You need to take the tick out of the 'On Mouse Click' check box and put one in the 'After' and then set a number of seconds for this slide to be displayed.  We have set the one below to 5 seconds:

You can also specify a transition on this tab, such as 'Fade' if required.

3.  Repeat Step 2 for every slide in in your presentation.  You can set each slide separately depending on the amount of time each slide should be shown for.

4.  We now need to set the presentation to automatically loop at the end.  Click on the 'SlideShow' tab:

and then click on the 'Set Up Slide Show' button:

Set the 'Show type' to 'Browsed at a kiosk (full screen)'.  This sets the 'Show options' section to 'Loop continuously unitl 'Esc'.

5.  Save and preview your presentation.  If should transition automatically between slides and then loop at the end.  This is now ready to display on your digital signage computers.