Animation

Something that everyone wants to add but that few do well is animation. And things got a whole lot worse when PowerPointXP came along. A total re-working of animation made almost anything possible – and regrettably, made the simple, classy routines much trickier.

So there’s a lot to be said for not bothering but, if you insist, here goes some of the essentials:

First choice should be what they call an Animation Scheme, accessible under the Slide Show menu.

Select one of the types featured and each part of your slide will get an animated effect. For slides with several lines of text, probably the most typical you’ll encounter, the effect Fade in one by one will do a reasonable job that won’t upset or frighten your audience.

Click on your selection and, for consistency, it’s a good idea to Apply to All Slides. Tick the AutoPreview box and the slide display will do its thing which saves you having to run the whole show to see what happens.

On the slide there will be numbers attached to the various sections. These indicate the sequence of animation of items on the slide. Annoyingly, the standard scheme seems to include the heading or title on slides which is pretty pointless as it results in a new slide appearing initially completely blank and your audience sighs quietly as the title does its animated thing, assuming you remember to click the mouse. So get rid of that – this is how:

Use Slide Show | Custom Animation and as well as numbers appearing on your slide content, a panel on the right will change to list the items being animated.

Click on the one your wish to change, in this case the one marked 0. Then click the little arrow next to it in the list. On the menu that opens click on Remove.

That’s better.

Now for a quick look at what else is possible. Either select a section, line of text or place a new graphic on your slide. In this example we’ve used a ball. Use SlideShow | Custom animation to bring up the panel.

Add Effect opens a choice of how and when the animation should work. Normally you’ll only need Entrance but let’s see what the most bizarre, and amusingly titled, Motion Paths does.

Basically, you can describe how you want the object to move. There are the expected up, down, left right etc but have fun with drawing a Custom Path using Scribble. Use the pencil and drag your mouse anywhere you like on the slide. When you stop, the programme very cleverly marks the start and end and makes the object follow the line you’ve traced.

Quite how on earth this can contribute anything to a presentation I don’t know but you’ll have fun playing until the novelty wears off and may be able to answer the inevitable students’ questions.

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