PowerPoint 2007 Slides Won't Automatically Advance

Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software has established itself as the leading tool for businesses wanting to make effective and dynamic presentations. One of the benefits of PowerPoint is its ability to advance slides automatically based on timings. To advance slides in your presentation based on preconfigured timings, you must configure both the slide show as a whole and the individual slides. If your slides aren't advancing as expected, the problem may be in the PowerPoint presentation itself.

Each slide in a PowerPoint presentation has its own timing settings that can be set to advance the slide manually (on a mouse click), or automatically after a set time. The timing settings are on the Animations tab of the ribbon menu under the Advance Slide heading. The "Automatically After" box should be checked, and an appropriate number of seconds selected in the field to the right. This setting applies only to the current slide; to select all the slides in a presentation, click anywhere in the slide thumbnail list on the left and press Ctrl+A.

As well as setting timings for each of the individual slides within your PowerPoint slide show, you must also configure the presentation as a whole. By selecting "Set Up Slide Show" from the Slide Show tab of the ribbon menu you can access an Advance slides setting that determines the behavior of the presentation. Make sure "Use timings, if present" is selected, not the "Manually" option. Clicking "OK" on the Set Up Show confirms your choice and applies it to the presentation.

Before you save the presentation for distribution elsewhere or launch it in front of an audience, test the slide show to ensure that the correct automatic advance settings are in place. The presentation can be launched from the beginning or from the current slide using the icons available on the Slide Show tab of the PowerPoint ribbon. Alternatively, press F5 to launch the slide show from the beginning or Shift-F5 to view it from the current slide. Ensure that each slide is displayed long enough for the viewers to take in the information.

If the timing settings are configured correctly and the timing problem persists, an embedded object may be causing the slide show to hang. Remove the troublesome slide's audio, video, and image elements one by one to determine whether one of the elements is the source of the glitch. The file itself could be corrupted. Save the file to a different folder and give it a new file name. Then reopen the newly christened presentation and test whether the change cured its timing malady.