Reset a PowerPoint show?

Does anyone know if there is a way to get a game in PPS mode to re-set or re-start from the beginning and be fully playable without having to exit and open up the file again.

For example, you have a two-slide game, with on-click animations on both slides and a 'Try again' button on slide two, hyperlinked back to slide one.

- You complete the slide one animations, go on to slide two, make a mess and hit the 'Try again' button.

- You then go back to slide one but the animations are not re-set and the slide is just as you left it and you can't do the on-click animations again - or can you??  (Hope this makes sense!)

I suspect it can be done with a macro but don't know how complicated this would be - can it be done without a macro?

John,

Ever heard of Custom Shows? It's running a slideshow, within a slideshow.

To set it up, go to Custom SlideShows from the Slideshow Tab. It will ask you to select the slides you want for your Custom Show. For your example, it will be Slide 2. Name your Custom Show, and save.

Then, go to Slide 1, and relink the button to Slide 2 through Action Settings. Instead of going to Slide 2, you are going to link to your newly named Custom Show.

On Slide 2, you are going to relink the button to Slide 1 to say "End Show" which would then exit your Custom Show and go back to the first Slideshow you were currently in, which was Slide 1. Going back into the Custom Show would essentially reset Slide 2.

I'v heard of, and seen the option for Custom Shows - but never used them.

Thank you so much, I'll give this a try.

Yes. Got it to work in a couple of ways with link to 'end show' as above. Also tried link from Custom slide to 'slide one' and that started slide 1 from scratch.

Thanks again.

If you don't feel like turning to the complications of using custom shows in the future, it helps to know that if a button links directly to a slide with key animations, PowerPoint has a glitch where the slide won't reset each time the button triggers it.  That's why the ball in "JayBowl - LEGENDS" only appeared the first time each score was rolled.

What I didn't find out until I started working on "GIGA STREET FIGHTER II" is that it does reset the slide if you add a blank or other transitional slide before the one that contains the desired result of the link, and then change the link to that intermediary slide.

Many times it's actually easier to use custom shows, but in case their interface ever leaves you jaded, there's a trick that just might save you some future headaches.

This thread is godsend, I can now make a restart button instead of force quit every time the cursor went off the tracks in my mazes.

There's also something on resetting slides in this post: TEST YOUR STRENGTH where it says:

I eventually worked out that if I set a transparent link to a duplicate of the animated slide (1a), but with all the animations removed, I could set 'Advance Slide' from the Transitions Tab to 0.5 (or even 0.0) seconds which would automatically take me to my animated slide (1b). When I did this, the 'With Previous' animations on slide 1b worked again and again as if the slide was opened for the first time, every time!





I must have missed the implications of the earlier suggestion of using an approach like this.

Sorry for the late response - I've been busy.
All my games use blank slides set to automatically transition after 0.01 sec.

I've done some experimenting and it also works at 0.00 seconds.

I'm feeling a bit stupid really. I'd been doing some pretty advanced stuff on PowerPoint for over 20 years - and only discovered this in the last few months!

Still, I suppose it just goes to show that there's always something more to learn with PowerPoint no matter how much of an expert you think you might be.