Chapter 6: Make It Move


Overview

Alicia is an elementary school teacher. Every year, her class has a session on whales and their migration. About three years ago, Alicia developed a series of PowerPoint presentations centering on the life and migration of a whale she called the "mythic whale ." Two years later, she emailed looking for help with animating her presentation.

A couple of years ago, I decided to create a presentation to help me teach my students about animal migration. I am now ready to take that presentation to the next level, but really don't understand PowerPoint animation. Can you help me out?

Currently, the presentation is slides of bulleted text, including a definitions slide, a slide with a picture of a whale's anatomy, a map with the migration pattern on it and some other informational slides.

The presentation as it exists is boring. I have tried to play with PowerPoint's animations, but I don't know what I am doing. Can you help me make the presentation a little more worth sitting through?

In all versions of PowerPoint, you can choose a variety of ways to make an object:

  • Become visible

  • Move across the screen

  • Change or disappear or change in a number of different ways.

In PowerPoint 2000 and earlier versions, the animation options are very limited. Each object can have at most one animation applied to it. Objects can only be moved on the screen after they become visible. Once an object is visible on the slide, the only built-in way to make it invisible is to make it change on the next mouse click or animation. All animations in these versions occur on the entrance of an object. The animation timeline for a slide is fixed. To have an action occur outside of the fixed timeline, other slides must be used to fake the effects.

In PowerPoint 2002 and later versions, all this changed. Objects can have three types of effects: entrance effects, emphasis effects and exit effects. Each object can have multiple animation effects applied to it, including multiple passes through the entrance and exit sequence. The addition of motion paths allow objects to move from one point on the screen to another along a predefined or user -drawn path . Animations can now occur in a non-linear manner through both animation ordering and animation triggering.




Kathy Jacobs On PowerPoint
Kathy Jacobs On PowerPoint
ISBN: 972425861
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 166

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net