A computer or television screen that counts down to next Christmas, creates attention and Xmas-awareness. This awareness is very important for shops. Public holidays or celebrations generate extra sales. Imagine Valentine. When you see that tomorrow it is Valentine, then you are almost obliged to buy something for your husband/wife/lover. It is the same (or even more) for Christmas. When you see Christmas trees, Santa Claus, presents wrapped in red paper, they all remind you about Christmas.

So when you bring Christmas-awareness to your shop, you will generate more sales. No doubt about that.

Nothing is better than a television screen where you count down to Christmas!

The Database

To design this countdown presentation, you will need PowerPoint. And our DataPoint plugin will help you to countdown automatically so that you don’t have to change the slide content every day, every hour or every minute. You can set up your own database, or download ours.

Our database has a table to store the end date: December 25, 2019.

And a query that calculates the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds from now till the end date, being Christmas or December 25.

The Dynamic Presentation

With DataPoint you can connect your presentation to data sources in order to display the latest information. This is great for e.g. news and weather too. But now we will use a simple countdown.

Set up a connection to your database and select the query to retrieve the information from.

You can see a preview of the countdown data here.

Design your presentation and slides. Use different text boxes to host the countdown process. Add a text box for the number of days, hours, minutes, and optionally seconds. Link each text box to the corresponding column of your database query.

After the text box linking, you are ready. You can add extra and additional slides to show your promotions and other information.

Set the slide transition to automatic (no advancing on mouse clicks) and set the slide show type to kiosk.

Start your dynamic countdown presentation manually on your computer. You can attach a computer or television screen to your computer and show the countdown presentation at large.

Optionally you can use our ShowPoint or iPoint software to schedule, distribute and launch the presentation, without manual interventions.