Countdown timer for PowerPoint Presentations

A friend of mine asked me if I had a 15 minute countdown timer for PowerPoint presentations. He does seminars for O'reilly Auto Parts, and wanted something to leave on screen to show the attendees how much time was left on their break.

I had a 5 minute AVI file that I had downloaded from the internet sometime back, so I went looking for others, and didn't find anything I liked. I did read that the simplest method was to use 15 slides that flipped automatically at one minute intervals. And by using animations, you could have a seconds representation. See image for screenshot, or click here to download the PowerPoint file.

After giving it some thought, I decided it would be cool to have it look like an hourglass. So along came version 2. See screen shot, or click here to download PowerPoint file.

I showed them to Rick, and he liked the first one, except he thought it would be cool to have a single slide with a 15 minute scale. So you guessed it version 3. Also a side note that these were also about 10 minutes worth of work and not really putting much thought into the graphics knowing Rick would probably change them to meet his show.

After looking back at it the following day, I thought it was rather plain. It would be awesome if I could get it to look like a car instrument gauge that the needle moved. So after a day of figuring out VBA code for PowerPoint, working out some bugs, and adjusting the layout, I finally came up with this version. To use it, click on the "14" on the gauge to start a 15 minute countdown, or click on the "10" to have it jump to 10 and countdown. Be sure to have macros enabled in the security settings of PowerPoiint, or it will never start. Because of the macros, it's a little harder to use. But the easiest way it to copy your slideshow into this one, or build yours around it. If you copy this one into another show, you have to import the macro because it won't copy. You will also have to use the identifyme macro to find out the group number and slide number of the needle, and replace that in the code.