I want to loop about 4-5 slides in the beginning of my presentation until I am ready to move on. It seems that there was a way to do this in the older models of PowerPoint but not in the 2013 version. Any suggestions?

It depends how seemless you want the process to be?
Are you ok with your audience seeing you move from the looped slides into your main presentation or do you want it to be completely invisible to your audience?

You can setup 2 x custom slide shows and run slides 1-5 as the first custom show and have them loop and then have a second custom slide show with slides 6 onwards and activate that once you are finished with the initial slides looping.

I prefer the audience to not be able to see the move from the looped slides to the rest of the presentation. How would you activate the second custom slideshow without stopping the first and moving to the second?

That is what I thought you might prefer but thought I'd check. With the custom slide show you need to go into the Custom Slide Show dialog and activate the show you want to watch so the audience would see that.

If you are not sure how many times you want the first few slides to loop then to make it as simple as possible and so your audience see's a smooth presentation, I would put the slides you want to loop into a separate PSTX file and set that to loop through Set Up Slide Show and then have the second set of slides in another PSTX file and have that already in Slide Show mode. Run your loop presentation in slide show mode and then when you want to stop that and begin your presentation simply go to the keyboard and press Alt + Tab and move to your main slide presentation and begin from there. It will leave your slides looping still in the background but it won't be visible to your audience.

Thanks i will take a look at that and see how it goes. I did notice that you can right click in the custom presentation #1 and then select custom presentation #2 that way also, but it is quite noticeable.

My only problem with running two presentations at the same time is that it might bog down the PC. My presentation is very interactive and there is a lot of movement/target related animations. I will have to try and see. Thanks!!!!

I used to present interactive PPT presentations very regularly and would have multiple programs also running in the background which I would move between for demonstration purposes. Unless your computer is on the older side or you already have issues running multiple programs at once then you should be ok with this method.

Of course your other option if possible is have two computers, 1 with the loop slides running, second with your main presentation and then have a switch box between them & the projector and just switch between the two monitors with a flick of the switch box. I have done this before also.

You should be able to have a transparent (invisible) button set to link to the second custom show. That wouldn't be very noticeable. It would also be possible to have an off screen button activated by TAB + ENTER which would be invisible to the audience.

Example Here (Press TAB then ENTER to leave looped intro)

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Custom show works, and the off screen or invisible button will work great. It seems that my intro keeps getting hung though. Sometimes it will loop, and sometimes it will get hung up right before the transition and just sit there.

Make sure all the slides in the intro are set to transition "AFTER x Secs". If there is audio or video you need to set it to play across 999 slides.

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The first slide has a 10 sec delay; it also contains a few animated Gifs, a single animation, and a repeating animation. The other 3 slides have no animations, but the transition is 4 sec with a 2 sec delay. It seems to get hung up on the second or third somtimes.

Without seeing it there's no way to tell but my guess would be the repeating animation is causing the problem. Transitions always wait for animation to complete.

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Microsoft PowerPoint MVP 2007-2023
Free Advanced PowerPoint Tips and Tutorials