Morph, a Twelve-Step Build, and a Clicker That Skips
A 28-slide keynote uses Morph between five section openers and a 12-step build on the product demo slide, every step set to start on click. Rehearsal runs 22 minutes against an 18-minute slot. On the venue laptop, Morph plays as a plain fade, the build fires out of order when the presenter uses the arrow keys, and the clicker's Page Up jumps two steps at a time. Two slides also still carry After Previous timings from an earlier draft, so the deck advances by itself mid-sentence. The session is streamed with live captions, and a colleague following the stream needs the content described.
1. Morph plays as a fade on the venue laptop. What does that tell you, and what do you do in the hour before the session?
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Morph is version-dependent - it exists in Microsoft 365 and PowerPoint 2019 onward, and older builds fall back to a fade without an error. So the venue machine is on an older PowerPoint, or the file is being opened in a viewer that does not support it.
In the hour available:
- Confirm the version (File > Account) on the actual machine you will present from. Do this before you start redesigning anything.
- If it is genuinely older, do not fight it. Redesign the five openers so they read acceptably as a fade: they must have a clear title, a discernible change of topic, and no reliance on an object appearing to 'morph' from one position to another.
- Alternatively, use a transition that exists on both versions and is deliberate rather than accidental - Push or Fade set consistently - so the audience sees a designed effect rather than a fallback.
- Worst case, export to video or PDF for the section openers and play them as media, but only if the venue machine can play media reliably.
Reasoning: the failure is silent, so the only defence is testing on the target machine, and the fix must not depend on a feature that is not there.
2. The build fires out of order, and Page Up skips two steps. Explain the cause and the fix.
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Two separate problems that look like one.
Out-of-order build. Effects were almost certainly added in the order they were drawn, not the order they should appear. Open the Animation Pane and read the list top to bottom - that list is the play order. Reorder by dragging, and set each to start On Click so the presenter controls it. Check the Effect Options for anything set to After Previous or With Previous, which slip a step in without a click. Using the arrow keys during a show triggers the next effect regardless of what is selected on screen, so the sequence must be correct in the pane, not just visually sensible.
Page Up skipping. Page Up/Page Down map to previous/next slide in many clickers, while the presenter expects them to step back through animations. The result is a jump past several build steps that cannot be recovered without restarting the slide. Fix by using the clicker's advance button for build steps and reserving the slide navigation buttons for slide changes - or reduce the risk by lowering the step count.
Reduce the build to 5–6 steps. Twelve clicks in a fixed-click sequence on a live demo is a reliability problem, and it is also part of why the rehearsal runs 22 minutes against an 18-minute slot.
3. Two slides auto-advance mid-sentence. Fix it, and address the accessibility of the build and transitions for the streamed audience.
Read the worked answer
Auto-advance. The After Previous timings are on the transitions tab, not the animations tab - go to Transitions, look at the Advance Slide group, and clear After on every slide (or apply the timing fix slide-by-slide for the two offenders, then scan all 28). Also check the Slide Show tab's Use Timings checkbox: if timings are on and any slide has an After value, the deck will keep moving on its own. Clearing the timings and unchecking Use Timings gives two independent defences.
Accessibility for the stream.
- The build must not be the only carrier of meaning - if a step is required to understand the point, the presenter must say it, and the final state of the slide must be complete on its own.
- Avoid flashing, rapid spins, or repeated motion; they are a genuine problem for some viewers and are made worse by streaming compression.
- Ensure reading order matches visual order on the demo slide (Selection Pane / Arrange > Selection Pane lists the order), and that every image, including the demo screenshots, has alt text describing the state being shown.
- Give captions a chance: pause a beat after each build step so the stream's live captioning can catch up, and keep the on-slide text short enough to be read rather than paraphrased.
Timing: cut the build to 5–6 steps and give back the four minutes the rehearsal lost; an 18-minute slot with a 22-minute rehearsal has no room for a slide that advances itself.