Chapter 18: Creating Animation Effects and Transitions

Overview

So far in this book, you have learned about several types of moving objects on a slide. One object type is a movie, or video clip, that has been created in an animation program or recorded with a video camera. Another type is an animated GIF, which is essentially a graphic that has some special properties that enable it to play a short animation sequence over and over.

However, neither of these types is what PowerPoint means by animation. In PowerPoint, animation is the way that individual objects enter or exit a slide. On a slide with no animation, all of the objects on the slide simply appear at the same time when you display it. (Boring, eh?) However, you can apply animation to the slide so that the bullet points fly in from the left, one at a time, and the graphic drops down from the top afterward.

A transition is another kind of animation. A transition refers to the entry or exit of the entire slide, rather than of an individual object on the slide.

Here are some ideas for using animation effectively in your presentations:

• Animate parts of a chart so that the data appears one series at a time. This technique works well if you want to talk about each series separately.

• Set up questions and answers on a slide so that the question appears first, and then, when you click the question, the answer appears.

• Dim each bullet point when the next one comes into view, so that you are, in effect, highlighting the current one.

• Make an object appear and then disappear. For example, you might have an image of a lightning bolt that flashes on the slide for one second and then disappears, or a picture of a racecar that drives onto the slide from the left and then immediately drives out of sight to the right.

• Rearrange the order in which objects appear on the slide. For example, you could make numbered points appear from the bottom up for a Top Ten list.