00:00 slide transition in Powerpoint

Question

In a Powerpoint presentation, one can choose the slide transition time: the time that a slide is visible before it automatically switches to the next slide. The default slide transition time is 00:00

If you set a slide's transition time to 00:00, it doesn't actually skip the slide, but it shows it for a veeeery short time - let's call this time t - and then goes to the next slide. If there are a large number of slides in the show, and they all have slide transition time set to 00:00, the whole show can last for an appreciable length of time. t may be very small, but 1000t can be several minutes.

What's this good for? Animation! Powerpoint's built-in animations are very good, but if you want more flexibility, nothing can beat a bit of good ol' stop-motion.

And this brings me to my problem. A long time ago, I made a short animated film in Powerpoint 2000. As I recall, it was exactly 1000 slides long. The thing is, the value t₂₀₀₀ that a 00:00 slide lasted for in Powerpoint 2000 is a lot more than the value t₂₀₀₃ that it lasts for in Powerpoint 2003 (and later versions).

On my current version (Powerpoint 2003 running in Windows 8.1), a 1000-slide-long presentation where every slide is set to 00:00 lasts for around 17 seconds. I haven't got other versions to hand, so I can't give any other figures, but they were a lot longer. If I try to watch my old animations, they go way too fast!

Is there any hack I can use to manually change the actual time that a 00:00 slide lasts? Failing that, is there another way? A VBA trick? Deliberately slowing down my computer?

Answer 1

I can see reasons to do a movie and reasons not to. If you want to try the latter and adjust the timing for all of the slides, this'll do it. Change the 5.55 to however many seconds.fractions you like:

Sub SetAdvanceTimeAllSlides()
    With ActivePresentation.Slides.Range
        .SlideShowTransition.AdvanceTime = 5.55
    End With
End Sub

If nothing else, you can use this to adjust the transition times until you have it running the way you want it on your computer, then make a video. You may have to adjust things again after testing that, because the act of making a video may also change the timings.

Answer 2

Another solution (not as quick as the accepted answer, but more elementary):

It's actually possible to set the transition time to a fractional value, just by typing it in:

I'd somehow assumed that, since the default value in the box was

00:00

rather than

00:00.0

that this would just correct to 00:00, but it doesn't, and the presentation ends up running slightly slower than it does at 00:00.

A time of 00:00.1 works well for my old animations. Steve's VBA script can be adapted to change the transition time to 00:00.1 on all slides that had it set to 00:00 originally.