PowerPoint Tip: Play show while working
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Have you ever wanted to have a presentation play on it’s own on one monitor while you work on another? With Vista, you can!
Here’s how you can do it:
- Open your presentation and use Set up Show to set it to play in a window on your secondary monitor.
- Make sure that the animations and transitions are set to go after a certain amount of time, rather than on mouse click.
- Play the presentation.
- The presentation will start on your second screen. Continue working on the first screen and you will see that what you do has little effect on the presentation.
I have not tested this with Office 2003. It may work, it may not. I’ll update this entry when I know one way or the other. I have tested this on Office 2007 and there it does work - quite well.
If you are running Vista on a Virtual Machine, it seems that this process doesn’t work. I am not sure why. If you don’t have two monitors, you can run a presentation while doing other things. While I couldn’t see a reason to use this process on a single monitor system, Bruce (my hubby) came up with a great one. If you need to see how long it takes a presentation to run clear through, you can start it, work on other things. If you have a sound run as the last animation on the last slide, you won’t even have to check for the end - it will tell you!.
In that case, you can switch between the window with the presentation and the other open application windows on your machine by using the Windows key and the tab key. Use both keys to bring up the rotating windows, then hold down the Windows key until your presentation is up front. Let it play for a while. To go back to other work, use the same key sequences.
Why does this work? Well, Vista is set up to continue processing even when the window isn’t active. I had this idea when I saw a demonstration of a video being played while the windows were being tabbed through. Once I knew this was possible, I asked if PPT presentations should do the same thing. Turns out they do - if they are in their own window. Vista seems to see the playing presentation the same way it does a video playing in a window.
If the presentation is playing full screen, it won’t work. So, you will need to live with the bar at the top that tells you the presentation title. But, if you need to play presentations and work at the same time -you now have a way!
Tags: powerpoint, vista, dual screen, presentation, background processing
12 Comments
Crystal G.
February 23rd, 2007
at 10:38am
THIS ARTICLE WAS VERY VERY HELPFUL! I have been trying to find out how I can run a powerpoint slide show in one screen but still use the internet, Word, or other applications in the other screen…. and I always thought I was doing it wrong!!!! But according to this article, it’s probably just because I have Powerpoint 2003 and Windows XP. Everytime I set up an automatically timed slide show, it starts to run and the minute I click anywhere else, it stops! I can’t use any other applications because the Powerpoint window is then “deactivated”. Hopefully, once I get Powerpoint 2007, it’ll work… or do I need Vista too????
callkathy
March 9th, 2007
at 1:49pm
The thing that really makes this tip work is Vista.
Kathy
Anthony T
March 27th, 2007
at 9:16am
Kathy
Thank you for that PowerPoint tip and also for all the other advice and links. As a thank you and as I have been collecting PowerPoints for some time now, I send you this link. Please feel free to use but do not link directly to them please. I will tell you when I have them on there own site. ALSO if you have any that I could add or if you would be so good as to ask others for me I would appreciate it.
Tony from the other side of the pond
PS Have checked ALL of them with AVG and all is OK
zedadiah
April 1st, 2007
at 3:19am
This is not just limited to Vista.
I have XP and PPT 2000 and I have been doing it this way for years. The trick is getting it to show full screen on the secondary monitor (or projector) and the best way to do this is as follows:
In the screen property settings, select the secondary monitor so that it is an extension of the desktop and drag the screen icon so that it is positioned directly below the primary monitor (for this you will need to position your task bar at the top of your main screen first).
Then in ppt when you set up show, select “browse in a window” and uncheck “show scrollbar”.
Then when you start the show you can resize the window (full width and height) and drag it down to the secondary monitor below. Note that you can enlarge the height of the window so that the top and bottom bars don’t show on the secondary monitor (you will actually see the top bar at the bottom of your main monitor).
You can also drag the top menu bar out of the window and onto your main monitor so that you can use the browse tab to navigate the presentation.
Then you can run whatever you like on the primary monitor and it will not affect the playing of the presentation.
Hope this is helpful.
callkathy
April 1st, 2007
at 8:13am
Zedadiah,
Yes, the ability to run a presentation in a window has been there for a long time. But, if you aren’t running Vista, the presentation stops running when it losses focus. It may still get time and advance somewhat, but it is not getting full processor time. If you want to see this for yourself, run a video on one screen and do something in a window on another. You will see that in XP the video doesn’t run right, but in Vista it does. This change is what makes the trick for PPT work.
Kathy
zedadiah
April 24th, 2007
at 2:07am
Kathy,
Just to reconfirm that the way I described the setup of PPT in XP does work. I have no problems with videos playing properly on the primary monitor while PPT’s run on the secondary monitor (with all transistions and animations running) without stopping.
I can even run a video in a window on the same monitor as the PPT while it runs behind, and still run another video on the primary monitor.
So I don’t know what the big deal is with Vista.
zedadiah
callkathy
April 24th, 2007
at 10:37am
Zedadiah,
I see why you are confused now. This tip doesn’t just let you play a movie on the second monitor, it lets the presentation itself continue running. In previous operating systems, if you had a presentation running and you navigated away from the window where it was running to anywhere but that presentation’s PPT edit interface, the presentation would stop running.
With Vista, you can let the presentation run along on one monitor (or in one window) while you do other work. Giving another window focus, doesn’t stop the presentation from continuing.
Needing to run a show while doing other things is a common enough problem that there is a program available from Chirag (one of the other PPT MVPs) called PowerShow which lets you do this in other versions of the operating system. I can’t wait to see what Chirag does with PowerShow and Vista… The places he can take it boggle the mind.
zedadiah
May 15th, 2007
at 4:16am
I don’t know why you think I’m confused. When I set it up the way I have explained, it runs fine - I’m saying everything runs fine: PPT’s and Video at the same time, no matter which window has focus.
The PPT keeps running as normal and every other window runs as normal no matter what’s running in them and doesn’t make any difference when changing focus from one window to the next.
I do not have a problem!
zolcos
May 17th, 2007
at 10:02am
zedadiah is right. I have PPT 2000 and Win XP, and PPT can run a show in a window while I multitask.
I just got all the latest post-SP3 hotfixes for Office 2000; maybe that is the difference?
Ben Davidson
June 13th, 2007
at 5:00pm
I had a question if its possible to get an answer. I was wondering how to keep the information updating automatically. I have been messing around and it seems like excell has to be open,if i am using an excel object linked in powerpoint, and that the feed will not automatically update while the slideshow is actually being presented. Is this right or am I doing something wrong? It seems to only update when the slideshow is in its editing form. Ideally I want to have powerpoint pulling a stock feed from the excell file on the server that constantly updates in real time the slides and objects that are being displayed while playing in the companies lobby.
callkathy
June 13th, 2007
at 5:09pm
Ben,
I have just the answer for you: Shyam has an add-in that will update the linked content for you: http://skp.mvps.org/updtlinks.htm
The price on that one? Free! Can’t beat that, now can you?
Jason Brentlinger
August 24th, 2007
at 7:57am
Ben
go to Presentationpoint.com and buy there software it is cheap and it will handle exactly what you want with out learning any new tricks.