Prevent auto advance to First Slide?

Jul 19, 2012

H Deist
By H Deist

Hey all, I'm just finding my way around Presenter 09. I'm able to create and publish an LMS module generated from an Office 2010 Powerpoint presentation, and when I open it the first slide immediately plays. However my users don't want that; they want it to be in a paused state initially, so the user can start it when she's ready.

I've seen that I can set the slides to advance "By User" instead of "Automatically" under Slide Properties. That's almost what I want, but this apparently applies to the end of the specified slide rather than the beginning. That is, if I set slide 1 to advance manually, slide 1 will still play automatically then pause before advancing to slide 2. I want to advance manually from slide 0 so to speak, such that slide 1 doesn't start until asked. I guess I can add a very short dummy title slide prior to the real first slide and set it to manual start, but that's a bit of a nuisance as I have a considerable number of existing presentations I'd like to fix as well.

Is there a better way I haven't found ?

Thanks a lot!

5 Replies
Jeanette Brooks
almost 12 years ago07/20/12 at 3:04 am (UTC)

Hi H, and welcome! Yeah, the way the course launch works, the first slide will immediately play as soon as the the course opens. In Presenter there's really not a way to prevent that from happening, but as you mentioned, you could go with a duplicate slide placed at the very beginning of your presentation, with no audio or animations. If you went with that solution, you might want to avoid that duplicate slide from appearing in your sidebar outline, in which case you can hide it from the menu.

I'm not sure if you're exploring other tools or if you already own Presenter... but if you went with Storyline, you'd have more control over something like this, because you could create a trigger that pauses the timeline as soon as the course opens, and then create some other user-controlled trigger (such as an on-slide button) which triggers the timeline to play when the learner's ready.

Christine Hendrickson
almost 10 years ago05/05/14 at 4:34 pm (UTC)

Hi Victoria,

You can certainly do this, quite quickly, in Presenter '09. 

  • To do so, click on the "Slide Properties" button in the Articulate ribbon.
  • Once here, click on the final column labeled "Advance" so that the full column is highlighted.
  • From here, right-click on "Advance" and select the option for "Advance to next slide >> By User". 

This should change the setting for all of the slides in your project. 

I hope this helps! :)

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