Have you ever wanted to display what the current time was in a PowerPoint presentation.  Not just the time you opened the presentation… but a real-time view of what the time is?

For example, you might be putting together some slides for an event or business seminar, and you would like to display something at the start of the presentation that says when the session will start, and what the current time is (like the slide above).

Well I thought it wasn’t possible… until today that is!

It is actually really easy to do.  But first you need to download an add-in for PowerPoint 2007.

1) Make sure that PowerPoint 2007 is not open
2) Go to http://officeone.mvps.org/autodatetime/autodatetime.html and download the Office One Auto Date Time 2.3 Add-in for PowerPoint
3) Run the file you just downloaded
4) Start PowerPoint 2007

So that is the first part out of the way, setting up PowerPoint 2007 to display the current time.  The next step is to enable the add-in.

1) Select the “Add-Ins” tab in the ribbon, and look for the “Menu Commands” Group
2) Click on “AutoDateTime”
3) Check the “Enable AutoDateTime” box
4) Type in how you want the date or time using the legend on the dialog box
4) Click OK

So what if you want to include the current time on every slide in PowerPoint 2007?

1) Click on the “View” tab
2) Look for the “Presentation Views” group and click on “Slide Master”
3) Go to the first master slide
4) Click on the “Insert” tab in the ribbon
5) Look for the “Text” group, and click on “Date & Time”
6) Check the “Date and Time” box
7) Click “Apply to All”
Move the text box around to where you want it, and change the font as you like
9) Click on the “Slide Master” tab in the ribbon, and then click on “Close Master View”

It is even easier if you just want to include the current time on a single slide (like in the example above)

1) Click on the “Insert” tab in the ribbon
2) Look for the “Text” group, and click on “Date & Time”
3) Check the “Date and Time” box
4) Click “Apply to All”
5) Move the text box around to where you want it, and change the font as you like

If you want more detail on how to use the OfficeOne AutoDateTime 2.3 Add-in, check out the detailed instructions on the AutoDateTime website.

’till next time!
TNP

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