In Microsoft PowerPoint, when you navigate past the very last slide of your presentation, the program automatically terminates the slideshow. The screen abruptly cuts to a stark black screen that reads “End of slide show, click to exit,” and a subsequent click unceremoniously dumps you back into the messy editing interface in front of your entire audience.
From a professional speaking standpoint, this is a jarring transition. If you accidentally double-click your presentation remote, you can inadvertently kill your slideshow during your concluding remarks. Ideally, a presentation should simply lock onto the final “Thank You” or “Questions?” slide and refuse to advance any further until you manually press the Escape key.
You can easily stop PowerPoint from advancing past your final slide by looping the presentation or disabling the black screen feature.
How to Stop the Presentation from Exiting
The most foolproof way to prevent the slideshow from ending is to utilize the “Loop” feature.
- Open your presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Click on the Slide Show tab in the main ribbon at the top of the screen.
- Click the Set Up Slide Show button.
- A new dialog box will appear. Look under the “Show options” section.
- Check the box labeled Loop continuously until ‘Esc’.
- Click OK.
Now, if you are on the final slide and accidentally press the “Next” button, PowerPoint will not end the presentation. Instead, it will seamlessly loop back and display Slide 1. While not perfect, jumping to a title slide looks significantly more professional than crashing out to the editing interface.
How to Disable the Black “End of Slide Show” Screen
If you don’t want to loop back to the beginning, but simply want to eliminate the ugly black warning screen, you can disable it in the global settings:
- Click File > Options.
- Select Advanced on the left side.
- Scroll down to the Slide Show section.
- Uncheck End with black slide.
- Click OK.