Microsoft PowerPoint already comes with a lot of great design elements that let you spice up your presentations, but if you want to add some extra possess, you can also add custom animations. For example, you can have text fly in from off screen. Spin, flash or move from place to place.
In this example, I’m going to animate the text on the first slide of my presentation after the title slide. First, you need to select the animation’s tab in the top navigation then select the text that you want to animate. I’m just going to choose this whole text box, so that everything inside of it does the same animation.
Now, up in the top ribbon I can choose what kind of animation I want, so if I hover my cursor over the fade option I can see in the preview how that’s going to look in my presentation. You can also choose the wipe animation or to have your text fly in, that’s actually my favorite so I’m going to select that option.
If you want to take another pick and how it will look, you can click the preview button on the top navigation. You can also click on the little slide show icon in the bottom right corner of your screen to play your presentation from the current slide on. And if you decide you don’t want any animation after all, you can just go back and highlight the text that you selected before, and then in the animation’s group you choose No Animation. You can see the preview button isn’t highlighted because there isn’t any animation to preview anymore okay.
In that first example I had all the text to appear once, but I actually want each bullet point to appear one after the next, so I’m going to animate the text with some custom effect. First, I need to highlight my text again, and this time I’m going to choose custom animation. Now, I get a dialog box where I can choose my effects in the order in which they occur. You’ll see here under Add Effect that you can choose an entrance or exit for your object or text. You can add emphasis or you can designate a motion path and send it off in the specific direction. I’m going to start by having each of my bullet points fly in, so I’ll select entrance and then choose fly in.
Now the challenge is that they all came in at once, and I want them to come in one after another. So, I need to tell PowerPoint when to start each line of text. Next, to the top bullet there’s a number one that means that one is going to appear first. Right now, the rest of the text is still attach to that one, so I’m going to click on the next bullet and then the dialog box I’ll set to start on mouse click, that way it won’t appear until I tell it too. I can also choose the direction that I want the text to fly in from and the speed, but I’m going to leave those settings as is.
Now, I need to do that for the rest of my text. I’ll just highlight each bullet and using the same steps as before, tell PowerPoint to send in the next line whenever I click the mouse. Over here on my slide I can also see the numbers to tell me what order the text animation will occur in. These numbers are just here in the preview. They won’t be in my document. And if I click the play button down here at the bottom, I can see how this will look when I give my presentation. If I needed too I could also use the reorder arrows here at the bottom to change the order of the effects, but since I’m all done here, I’ll just click to close the box.
I’m going to do one last effect in this presentation. Let me click over to the next slide. I want the picture to enter from the right, so I’m going to move it over to a good starting point. Then I’ll select custom animation from the top menu. I’m going to choose motion path as my effect and finally, I’m going to tell it to move my picture to the left. And then I’m going to set it to do the motion with the previews action, so that it happens as soon as I get to this slide without me having to click the mouse.
Now, I can see the whole thing in action with the slide show preview were down at the bottom. Let me go back to one slide and play. You can do all sorts of fun step with animation effect to bring your PowerPoint to life, have fun while you experiment to see what you can create.
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