The "Rehearse Timings" feature in PowerPoint is a tool to practice your presentation and record how long you spend on each slide, helping you fine-tune pacing and set up automatic slide transitions. It’s great for ensuring you stay on track during a live delivery or for creating a self-running slideshow. Here’s how to use it.
Start by opening your presentation in PowerPoint. Go to the “Slide Show” tab on the ribbon and click “Rehearse Timings” (it’s usually in the Set Up group). The slideshow will launch in full-screen mode from the first slide, and a small toolbar—the Recording toolbar—pops up, typically in the top-left corner. It shows a timer counting up for the current slide, plus a total time for the whole presentation. As you talk through your content, click the “Next” button (or hit the right arrow key) to move to the next slide when you’re ready. The timer resets for each slide, capturing how long you spend on it.
If you mess up or pause too long—like if you get distracted mid-rehearsal—you can hit the “Pause” button on the toolbar to stop the clock, then resume when you’re back on track. Made a mistake on a slide? Click “Repeat” to restart the timing for that slide from zero. Keep going until you’ve rehearsed the whole deck. When you finish (or hit Esc to stop), PowerPoint asks if you want to save the timings. Say yes, and those durations get applied to each slide’s transition, meaning the slideshow can now run automatically with your rehearsed pace. You can check or tweak them later in the “Transitions” tab under “Timing.”
