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Animation/Web: MultiMedia in your PowerPoint - Animation

There are two ways to animate things on your PowerPoint :

• Use the tools from within PowerPoint, or

• Create an animation using other tools, and embed that animation into PowerPoint.

            The latter can be accomplished through GIF animators like Jasc’s Animation Pro (bundled with Paint Shop Pro), or Microsoft’s Image Composer.  True video can also add animation to a PowerPoint, but that gets its own section here.

            PowerPoint provides preset animations - select an area to animate, and go to the “Slide show” menu item.  This is fine if you’re in a hurry, but it applies primarily to text animation, and offers only the most generic of animations.  Better to use “custom animations.”

            Enter the “Custom animations” by menu, or by right-clicking any option and selecting “Custom animations” from that menu.  The resultant window gives a complete list of every object on the slide.  In the top window, check off all items you wish to animate.  Then click on the "Order and Timing" tab and place the items in the order you wish them to happen.  If you want several things to happen at once, that's possible, but give them a general order here by clicking on anything you want to move, and using the arrows to move them up or down.

    Under "Start animation," you may select animations to happen "Automatically" after a set amount of time, or only on your bidding (a mouse click or space bar hit). If you wish the animation to happen automatically, set the ". . . seconds after previous event." "Previous event" can mean another animation on the slide, or the slide opening in the first place - determined by the "Order . . ." settings. Of course, a 0 time setting will mean that the animation with this setting will happen at the same time as the previous one.

    Once an object is selected to animate, you may add effects to that animation by clicking on the "Effects" tab.  Here you can choose what motion the animation will use, how fast it will take place, whether there will be a sound associated with the animation, and (in the case of text) whether the animation will happen line-by-line or all at once.

    A word of caution:  preset animations include the stock sounds, and you may select them here.  However, you should avoid them if at all possible.  Not only do the Microsoft-supplied sounds get used very frequently, the presence of sounds with animation can frequently be perceived as irritating or distracting. Use with caution!

    "After animation" settings apply to text only - it is possible to dim your text after the next line of text appears, thereby increasing focus.

    The "Chart Effects" tab allows you to select how a chart will appear, in much the same way that you can customize text animations - bringing in chart bars and legends with sounds and animation movements.  This tab is available only if the highlighted "Slide object" is a chart.

    The "Multimedia settings" apply only to sound/music or video, and this tab stays greyed out unless you've selected a sound or video object.  It is possible to use these settings as a way of embedding background music, or to allow a video or voice-over to play as the slide or slide show continues to run.  You can even get it to play over more than one slide.  Sound and Video are covered more extensively on their own pages.

        If you prefer to construct an animation (using a GIF animator) separately, you may simply embed it in a PowerPoint slide, and select a "No Effect" animation on a mouse click onr automatically, like any other image.