You’ve got the topic for your presentation all sorted. The slides have been written. Now it’s time for the last (fun) bit – adding animation!
What is Animation?
If this is something that you’ve not really used before, you might be wondering, what exactly is it?
Within PowerPoint – animation is the movement of things appearing and disappearing from the slide. It’s used to help make information memorable.
Adding it means applying the available effects to items on the slide. This can be text, shapes, charts – anything on the slide.
Quick Tip
While you can ‘animate’ the movement between the slides, this is actually the transition options, not animation.
Animation Options
In PowerPoint (and other presentation programs), there are three types of options that you can choose from:
Entrance
This is the most popular and well used command.
By adding this option to slide items, the slide can appear blank.
Clicking, or using any of the ‘next’ options (keyboard arrows etc), the item appears on the slide, and stay there.
Emphasis
The second option defines what the content does on the slide to make it stand out.
This often takes the format of changing colour or growing bigger.
Exit
Finally, the exit options can define how the content can leave the slide, so that it’s no longer displayed.
Note: This doesn’t delete the content, when you’ve finished.
Choosing the View
It’s a simple thing, but important. As you need to be able to select the individual elements on the slide, you can only apply animation in the Normal view.
How to apply animation
It’s simple really –
- Select the item on the slide
- Click on the Animations tab in the Ribbon
- Choose the effect to use
Order Counts
It’s not a big thing, because you can re-order them but;
The order that you select and apply the animation becomes the order that it plays.
So, take a moment to consider when you want each item to appear, move or disappear on the slide.
Presentation Example
I’ve put together a simple presentation to show you a sample of these options.
Click through the slides to see the different types of animation effects.
Updated Version Coming Soon
What to learn more about using animations in your presentation? Book a 1:1 session with me
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