MS Office: PowerPoint - blank screen

All,

When using PowerPoint, one can hit the 'B' key to blank the screen, and hit it once again to unblank the screen. The only problem with this is that the screen image is the same. Thus, this method works if the slide you want to present is the same both before and after screen blanking.

I am currently working on a presentation and I would like a blank screen between two slide. That is, when I hit the slide advance button, the screen should go blank, and when I hit it again, it should unblank and show the next slide.

Is there a way to do this? The only approach that comes to mind is to project a completely black slide. Is there another way?

It can be done with a picture show. But it is pretty tricky and neeeds to be setup for every slide. If it is a picture show we are talking about, here are the steps:

1. For each picture go to the Design tab > Background Styles (on the right) > Format background > Fill > Picture or texture fill > File > double click on a blank picture that you have fabricated e.g. with the snipping tool > Close.
2. For each picture, highlight the picture in the big main window, go to Animations > top left where it says "Animate", set to "Wipe" or Fly in". Note: It will not work without this step.
3. Try it out with "Slide show" > From Beginning

The main difference of this approach to inserting a blank page is that the blank page does not show up in your PP Picuture show original because it is hidden.

You could also do it by animating everything on the last slide before the blank - select all, use custom animation to give them all an exit animation of "disappear", set one of them to "on click" and all the others to "with previous". Then the slide will project normally, a click will remove everything to give a blank slide, and another click will bring on the next slide :)

I wanted to accomplish the same thing as the original poster and went looking for a property or action within PowerPoint that would work. After reading the previous posts in this thread, a pretty simple solution dawned on me. It works for me, see if this will work for you:

At the point in the presentation where you want the 'blank screen' - that is a black 'nothing screen' (what you would see if you hit the 'B' button on your keyboard)...

Step 1) Insert a slide with nothing on it.

Step 2) Add a rectangle shape to the slide that is the same size as the entire slide (to do this in PowerPoint 2010: 'Insert' > 'Shapes' > 'Rectangle'. Size the rectangle by dragging a diagonal corner and repositioning as appropriate.)

Step 3) Right-click on that newly added shape, and select 'Format Shape'. In 'Fill' > 'Fill Color' select Black and be sure 'Transparency' is set to '0%'.

That's it. Now when you transition to this slide, the screen will appear to be blanked out (although it is really just a slide with a black rectangle filling the whole slide). When you leave this slide, it will appear as though the screen has been "unblanked"

You can copy/paste this slide anywhere in the presentation where you want to speak for a moment and ensure attention is on what you are saying opposed to what's on the screen.

Good luck.