| In a sense, old-fashioned slide shows are animated. That is, you jump from one picture to the next, to the next, and so on. But in the world of PowerPoint, you do that and much more. You can, for example, do the following: You can determine how slides transition from one slide to the next, including the use of fades, wipes, dissolves, and so on. If you're not sure what these terms mean, don't worry: We'll talk more about them later in this chapter. You can determine how objects appear onscreen. Words, phrases, or graphic images can appear at the same time as the slide appears, or they can be made to appear sometime after the slide begins. For example, you could show the title "Birds of Prey" and then add the bullet "Eagle," then a picture of an eagle (see Figure 11.1), and finally, after you discuss that bird, you can add "Hawk," followed by another picture, and so on. Figure 11.1. Adding bullets and graphic elements one at a time helps keep the audience focused.  You can determine how long pictures remain onscreen and how they exit. For example, in the preceding example, you could make the eagle fly away before you talk about the hawk. You can make things move from one point onscreen to another. For example, you could trace a bird's migration path by having a pointer actually move along the path. You can use animations to simulate pointing, drawing, growing, and so on. For example, if you have a line that connects a label at the left to an image at the right, when you wipe right, it appears that you're actually drawing the line from the label to the image. Or you could make an arrow fly in from the left to make it appear that you're shooting the arrow.
Before we go much further, let's get something clear: Animations can be great fun, but they can also be annoyingly distracting. While there can be a place for gratuitous animation, there's even more use for properly applied animations. For example, a word falling onto the slide with a bomb sound might wake your audience up. But an animation that adds a slowly moving arrow between Wisconsin and California to illustrate a gradual shift in milk production dominance can help audience members understand and remember what they see. Note  | This is going to be a difficult chapter for you and for me. I know what I want to show you, and you'd like to see how these things actually work. But we have to talk about movement in a static medium. Where possible, I show before and after slides or before, during, and after slides. But if you want to see and understand the full effect of animations, I suggest that you start PowerPoint and try out the things you learn as we talk about them. |
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