Countdown to Christmas in PowerPoint

Create your own DIY PowerPoint presentation that counts down automatically to Christmas. Set a target date, December 25, and run your slide show. The slide will count down the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Our DataPoint add-on for PowerPoint, or our easier Dynamic TIME add-on, can do that for you. Both add-ons will allow you to countdown to a given date. If you only have to display a countdown clock, and nothing more, then use our Dynamic TIME add-on. On the other hand, if you want to display more dynamic information like news, weather, announcements, promotions, etc from various data sources, then use DataPoint. In this article, we will use DataPoint, since Dynamic TIME is so easy to use, even without instructions.

It starts with a small Microsoft Access database that you can download here. It contains a table to store the target date (Christmas day) and a query to calculate the difference between now and Christmas.

Open the Access database and open the only table in there, called TableTargetDate. Open the table by double clicking its name. This opens a new window with the current table content or row information. At the column named Target, enter the date for Christmas, 12/25/2017, and close the table window again. This will save the value to the database file.

On the database quiries, you will find here one query named QueryTargetDate. Double click the name to open the output of the query. This query is calculating the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds between now and Christmas.

The calculation is performed only once here, at the time of opening, and it will not refresh its calculation automatically. DataPoint will take care of the continuous updating.

This query is what we need in DataPoint. I’m nothing going thru all the steps to link a Microsoft Access database via DataPoint in PowerPoint. Basically, you need to set up the connection to the database, and then indicate what query you want to use.

Make sure to set the refresh rate to every second, in case you want to display the number of seconds. Here is a great article on how to link a Microsoft Access database in PowerPoint.

Link every text box on its corresponding column of the query (days, hours, minutes and seconds). Once all your text boxes were linked on the query, then you can run the slide show and the countdown to Christmas will start automatically.

Add-ons that can be used for dynamic countdowns in PowerPoint are DataPoint or Dynamic TIME.

This great presentation is free for you to download.