A funeral PowerPoint that follows the order of service

The download is a zip folder containing presentatie.pptx. Open it in PowerPoint 2010 or later, on Windows or Mac, and start the slide show from the beginning. There is nothing to link or set up. The music is embedded: in each part of the service the track starts by itself on the first slide and carries on across every slide of that part. If you shortened a song, the shortened version is what plays.

Slides advance automatically, timed to the length of the song. For example, a track of 3 minutes 30 seconds with 30 photos gives each photo 7 seconds. No photo stays up longer than 8 seconds; with too few photos for a long song, the set comes round again instead of one picture sitting on screen. The format is widescreen (16:9), and each slide is saved exactly as you saw it in the preview, with your crop, caption and transition.

Video clips are embedded too and play for their own length before the slideshow moves on. A walk-in or closing loop repeats in PowerPoint for as long as you set, then moves to the next part. If the service should only begin on a signal, set the following part to wait for start.

People who put together a PowerPoint for a funeral by hand tend to hit the same four snags. Timing: with 60 photos you set 60 durations, and adding one more throws the rest out. Music: an inserted song stops at the next slide unless you know where the play-across-slides setting lives. Photos: iPhones save pictures as HEIC, which older versions of PowerPoint on Windows often will not open. And files: versions travel back and forth by email until nobody is sure which is the latest.

Here the timings are calculated for you and written into the file. Add a photo, download again, and everything lines up once more. HEIC, JPEG, PNG, scans and PDFs go in as they are, with no converting. And there is one shared collection that everyone adds to, rather than attachments spread over ten emails.

The PowerPoint file is the final step. Before that, you invite family and friends by email as helpers; they get access with their email address and a code, and add photos, video clips and music to one shared collection. You decide what goes into which part of the funeral slideshow.

All of this runs in the browser on a phone, tablet or laptop, with nothing to install. You do not need PowerPoint yourself to make the memorial slideshow; only the computer at the service does.

For each part you add your own MP3. The photos spread themselves across the length of that song, and that same spread becomes the per-slide timing in the PowerPoint.

Because the person at the laptop is usually seeing your slideshow for the first time. A funeral PowerPoint that shows where it waits, where to click and what runs by itself asks no prior knowledge of them. The operating instructions put the same information on a single page.

Making, viewing and changing the slideshow is free. The preview plays it as it will run at the service, with music and wait points and a light watermark over it, as often as you like. You pay once, when you download the version without the watermark. There is no subscription and no payment details to enter beforehand. You can pay with iDEAL | Wero, Bancontact or card.

If you would rather not set it all up alone, an assistant in the simple view can prepare the parts of the service with you. The file you download afterwards is the same.