start a keynote presentation at a given time of day

Question

start a keynote presentation at a given time of day

I currently teach a Sunday school class for kids which starts at 10:00 a.m. Some kids arrive early and play around before class with games, crafts etc. I have a keynote presentation that has a 3 minute countdown video that I want to start automatically at 9:57. This tells the kids to put away all the games, crayons, etc. and get in their seats for class. Then at 10:00 I can start my lesson which includes a keynote presentation.

How can I get that countdown video to start at 9:57 automatically? I currently am starting it manually by watching the clock and starting it at the right time....but if I get distracted by some of the kids, It gets started late and therefore the class gets started late.

Thanks for any help you can give me. If it can't be done in keynote, is there vendor software which would work with keynote to make this happen?

Bobbie

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 15.6

Posted on Sep 20, 2025 07:50 AM

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Answer 1

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Camelot

Level 9

57,939 points

Sep 20, 2025 11:30 AM in response to Tennesseemtngranny

There's no single step to this - it's a multi-part thing, but certainly doable.

The simplest way here is to use Automator to create a Calendar Alarm workflow:

This workflow opens your Keynote document and starts the presentation. It has 4 actions.

Identify the file(s) to open
Open the file
pause a little to give Keynote time to open the doc
Start the presentation:

Save this workflow. Because you marked it as a Calendar Alarm, it's saved automatically in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Calendar/ and an event will be added to your calendar with this set as the trigger. Change the date and time to match your class, and s

Alternatively, you can attach the alarm to any other event on your calendar. Under the Alarm section, set an alarm to run 3 minutes prior to the event, with the 'Open' action set to the workflow you just created (here I saved the workflow as 'Countdown Trigger'):

Done. At the specified time, Calendar.app will launch the workflow, which will open the document and start the presentation.

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