Countdown Timers

In my longer trainings, I take a 10-minute break midway through to recharge the blood sugar and let everyone stretch. (I don't serve twinkies—the above is just a screen I put up previewing something we cover after the break...)

Since the training is a very full 3 hours, and since I never want to run over, I always make sure that the 10-minute break is exactly 10 minutes long. How? By just putting up a 10-minute countdown clock on the screen and starting to talk again when it hits 00:00. No, not everyone is back in their seats, but a lot more are now than when I used to take similar breaks without a countdown. 

Where to Get Timers

Google "PowerPoint Timers" and you'll find lots of tutorials and tricks for using timed animations and transitions to create a countdown timer natively in PowerPoint. Some are cool, but all are largely unneccesary. 

The best way to use a timer in PowerPoint is to insert a video file of a countdown. If your countdown is longer than what you need, simply advance the start point in the playback options (PPT 2010 and later or Keynote).

You can download a number of free video timers from ipresentee.com, a good site that also sells timers and other presentation tools. The catch is that these timers are for Keynote, so to use them in PowerPoint, you'll need to extract the videos from Keynote and then convert to a Windows friendly format. Click below for the timers on ipresentee.com.

Or...since I'm a nice guy, I converted my 10 minute Keynote timer for use in PPT. Right click the below image to download it to your desktop...