In the first step, click the slide preview for the slide you wish to set time for. For the purpose of this post, we will be using the Financial PowerPoint Template. In this tutorial we will show you how to set time duration to switch slides in PowerPoint. To do this, you can add a time duration to switch your slides. However, if you have your presentation well-timed or have to account for every second in a presentation due to time constraints, you might want to make sure that your slides are well-timed. Usually, presenters use mouse clicks, keys from a keyboard or a remote to switch slides in PowerPoint.