Sorry for the confusion. PPT relies completely on the power of the machine
to determine how long it takes to run a presentation. Well, not completely,
but the machine really is the deciding factor. What you are seeing is a
result of the machine never being in exactly the same state twice.
Try a little experiment. Open PowerPoint fresh, play your presentation and
time how long it takes to run completely. Now run in a couple more times
and record the times. You will see a significant difference between the
elapsed time of the first run through compared to the last one. Part of
that is due to PPT caching parts of the presentation, part of it is due to
whatever else you may have running in the back ground.
It's for this reason I put very little faith in rehearsal timings. Oh it
works well enough for gross settings, but any real tuning will have to be
done manually and I always recommend that if timing is important, run the
presentation through at least once just before making your live presentation
to get as much as possible into the cache.
On the flip side, look for ways to minimize the impact. Firing up a media
file immediately after a slide transition can often create a noticeable
delay. When the new slide appears, the machine must load the media player
from disk into memory, find and load the file, begin decompression, set the
hardware, and then play the file. Of course the entire time this is
happening PPT is still running and demanding it's time to get ready for
whatever comes next.
Of course it should go without saying but having a lot of things running in
the background that can make demands on the system should be avoided. An
example might be having a shared hard drive or folder available to others on
a network. Should someone request a large file while your presentation is
running, it will change the timing noticeably.
Another area to look at with a sharp eye is disk fragmentation. If it's
been awhile since you've done house keeping get rid of all those temp files
and then defrag the hard drive. This is something every user should do on a
regular basis and believe it or not it has tremendous impact on how well
applications and Widows itself runs.
Kentucky Windage - A term coined by the real life Sergeant York (maybe
you've seen the movie) that was from Kentucky and was one of the best
military rifle shots of his time. When asked how he could shoot in windy
conditions he said he applied his "kentucky windage" estimate to counter act
it. Sort of like if you know the wind will blow the bullet 6" inches to the
left, you aim six inches to the right and hope to get close.
Austin Myers
MS PowerPoint MVP Team
