Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “PowerPoint Timer Bar Tutorial”.
In this short intermediate PowerPoint tutorial, I want to show you how to create a timer bar in PowerPoint and in a previous tutorial I showed you how to create a countdown timer, basically on this particular slide. When I play the presentation, if I click it counts down. Five four down to one and then time is up and that’s really a nice thing to know how to do. Please watch my other tutorial if you’d like to learn how to do that. But on this next slide, I would like to instead of having a number counting down, I would like to have a bar that is across the screen, a timer bar, and that bar will disappear gradually until it gets to the very left side, and time is up And as a bonus, I would like to show you how to make a sound play when that happens like a buzzing sound. So I’m going to escape out of this presentation at least out of presentation mode to get back into editing mode and I’ll. Show you how to insert the timer bar. The first thing I would do is go to the insert tab and choose shapes in the illustrations group, so their shapes and I’m going to choose a rectangle. I think that makes the most sense for a bar. So I’ll pick this one, I like the rectangle with some curved edges. If you prefer, you can just do a regular, plain rectangle, but I’m gon na go with the curved edges. So I click on that and then I click and drag to draw the timer bar on the screen. Now it happened to come in in pink or purplish, but if I don’t like that color I can go up here to the format tab that appeared.
When I created the shape and with this format tab I can certainly adjust the color. I can choose a different style if I would like and then when I found one that I’m happy with, I just click on it. You can also right click and choose format, shape you’ll get a panel that opens at the right, and you can change the fill color and also the line color. Now that I’ve got my shape on the screen, I may want to shrink it down a little bit.
Just to make it not quite so thick but of course it’s up to you to decide what you like for your timer bar. How thick do you want that to be, but I think I’ll go with about that width. Next, I’m going to go to the animations tab and click, and I want to choose, fly out and this says fly in so to get fly out. I have to click on this button here with the arrow and that pops up a whole bunch of options, and one of them is fly out so I’ll click that now it flies out, but it flies down as it flies out, and I want to change that.
So here just to the right of the different animations, but still in the animations group, you’ll see effect options, click on that and it gives you the option to fly out to the left. Okay, so there’s my timer bar, but it was a little fast. So the final step is here on the right still on the animations tab and ribbon, but in the timing group, I’m gon na make sure it says start on click, that’s exactly what you want and then here for duration, I’m gon na up that to let’s say 10 seconds so I’ll, just replace 0 1 with 1 0 tap enter on the keyboard. So at this point, when I play this slide, this timer should start disappearing to the left and it should take 10 seconds to completely disappear.
So, let’s try it out. I’M gon na go to slideshow from current slide. There’S my timer bar, but if you remember, I set it to activate on click, so I have to click or advance the slide by using the arrow keys or a presenter, remote or a spacebar, so I’ll tap the arrow key in this case there’s my timer and It should take about 10 seconds to get off the screen and then it’s gone time is up. Hopefully the students know the answer to this question, which of course, is 5:00. I’M sure you knew that I’m gon na tap the Escape key on the keyboard. To show you one last option that you have, and that is: wouldn’t it be nice if, when the timer runs out a sound was played a buzzing sound or something to indicate to the students that time is up you’ve run out of time.
To do that, all you have to do is go here to insert and choose audio, you can see, audio is in the media group, so I’ll click on audio and if you have a buzzing, sound or maybe an audio clip from a TV show that the students, Like or some sort of fun sound, you could just choose audio on my PC and then search your PC for that audio clip and insert it in. In my case, I don’t have one of those handy, so instead I’m gon na just click and choose record audio. I’M just gon na do it kind of in a crude way, I’m just gon na click, the record button and just produce the sound with my voice, so I’ll click buzz and then click, OK and that sound now is produced.
It’S right there on the screen and I can click play to hear it sounds perfect and I might want to drag that sound just off the screen, so the students don’t see that sound, at least the icon for it. So now that I have the sound – and I have the timer bar, how do I get the buzzing sound to play when the timer runs out? Well, what I need to do is go back to the animations tab and ribbon and I’m going to open up this time. The animation pane, when you click that it opens up this panel at the right and you can see here’s my animation for the timer and then next I have the animation of my sound and the trick is. I need to click here on the recorded, sound and drag it so that it’s just underneath the timer bar here in this animation pane list, and then I need to make sure by clicking on this down arrow here or just going up here to the top. I need to make sure that it says that this recorded sound will play after previous.
In this case, I’m just gon na go up here to the top start after previous okay, let’s test this out I’ll, go to slideshow from current slide I’ll click and ten seconds pass very, very slowly when you’re watching a youtube, video so be patient. Alright, it worked beautifully, it got down to zero and the buzz sound played, and so I’ve shown you now how to add a timer bar on to your PowerPoint slides and also how to include a sound when the timer bar gets to zero. Just so you know you could also use the buzzing sound with a countdown timer, like the one I made in my previous video, so just know that you could insert that buzzing sound and do that the same way on this slide too. So thanks for watching this video, I hope you found it to be useful if you did.
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