Creating A Kiosk Presentation With PowerPoint

A kiosk is self-running, stepped or interactive presentation that runs unattended by a presenter. They're terrific for conferences, trade shows, and conventions as well as wedding receptions, retirement and birthday parties. Here's how to do it in PowerPoint.

Self-running presentations simply show one slide after the next, repeating ad infinitum. This works well for window displays, background information on a sales floor or trade show, and at parties or conventions.

Stepped presentations require the user to click 'Next' to go to the next slide and are great for simple mall kiosks, trade shows, conventions or conferences provided you give the visitor access to the mouse.

Interactive presentations ask the viewer to make a choice; depending upon which item they click, they're taken to different areas of the presentation to receive specific information they're interested in. This option is terrific for mall kiosks, conferences and trade shows, provided you have enough computers.

To prepare a kiosk, prepare a standard presentation, and then add either buttons or timings for advancement of each slide and set the presentation in kiosk mode. Action buttons or timings will allow visitors to your kiosk to move through the slides in the self-running presentation, and the kiosk setting will loop the presentation to the first slide if a visitor has reached the last slide within it, or it will return the presentation to the first slide when it has been idle on a manually advanced slide for longer than five minutes.

Kiosk Using Slide Timings

1. Slide Show menu -> Slide Transition.
2. Choose a transition from the drop down list.
3. Under Advance, UNcheck "On Mouse Click" and check "Automatically after." Choose a timing delay and click [Apply to All].
4. On the Slide Show menu, click Set Up Show.
5. In the Set Up Show dialog box, click the Browsed at a kiosk (full screen) check box. This setting restricts users from changing your presentation.
6. Under Advance Slides, check "using timings if present." Click OK.

Stepped Kiosk Using Action Buttons

1. View menu -> Master -> Slide Master.
2. Slide Show menu -> Action Buttons -> Action Button: Back or Previous (they will show tooltips when you mouse over them).
3. Click where you want the button to appear on the master; in the Action Settings dialog box, click OK.
4. Slide Show menu -> Action Buttons -> Action Button: Forward or Next.
5. Click where you want this button to appear on the master; in the Action Settings dialog box, click OK.
6. Slide Master View toolbar -> Close Master View.

Interactive Kiosk Using Action Buttons

For this option, it may be helpful (in fact I find it necessary) to draw a map of the presentation.

1. Navigate to the slide that will contain your first choice.
2. Slide Show menu -> Action Buttons -> Action Button: Forward or Next.
3. Click where you want this button to appear on the master.
4. Action Settings dialog box -> click Hyperlink to� -> from the drop-down list, select "Slide" and then choose the slide to jump to.
5. Repeat steps 2 - 4 for each choice. You may want to place text next to each button indicating the answers or choices. You can also right-click and choose "Add text."
6. Repeat steps 1 - 5 for each slide that will have choices.

Final note: if you do leave your presentation running as a kiosk, remember to turn off your screen saver and any power-save (auto-shutdown) features on your laptop ... otherwise you'll have a lovely copy of your screen saver running!