Office 2016 For Seniors For Dummies (2016)

Part IV

Outlook

For a guide to organizing your mail in Outlook, visit www.dummies.com/extras/office2016forseniors.

Part V

PowerPoint

For five great PowerPoint tricks, visit www.dummies.com/extras/office2016forseniors.

Chapter 16

Adding Movement and Sound

Get ready to . . .

Animate Objects on a Slide

Add Slide Transition Effects

Set Slides to Automatically Advance

Add a Musical Soundtrack

Remember slide projectors? Maybe you still even have one in the back of your closet. They show one slide after another on a screen, with a ker-chunk sound as the next slide pushes the previous one out the chute. Not very glamorous or exciting.

In PowerPoint, though, because your slides are electronic, a presentation can have much more exciting animation. You can assign any sounds or music you want, and you can create interesting animations when one slide replaces another or when content appears on a slide. A bulleted list can appear one line at a time, a graphic can “fly” in separately from the text, or a trumpet sound can announce an important slide’s appearance.

In this chapter, I show you how to create animation and transition effects on slides. I also show you how to add a musical soundtrack from an audio CD to a presentation.

Animate Objects on a Slide

By default, all the objects on a slide appear at once. Say you have a title, some text, and perhaps a graphic on a slide: They all show up together.

To add more visual interest to the presentation or to reveal bits of information at a time, you can use animation in PowerPoint. For example, you can pose a question in the title of the slide and then provide the answer in the body. Or you can have each item in a bulleted list appear one at a time.

You can control when the delayed content shows up by setting

· A time delay: The additional content appears after a certain number of seconds. This technique is good for autonomous presentations (without human interaction).

· A mouse click delay: Additional content appears only when you click the mouse or press a key on the keyboard. This technique is good for presentations with a live speaker because if someone asks a question or you get off-schedule, the animation won’t occur at the wrong time — you control its timing.

For simple entrance animation, pick an animation preset from the Animation tab’s Animation gallery. Follow these steps:

1. Select the object to be animated on its entrance. For example, if you want to animate a bulleted list on a slide, select the text box that contains those bullets. Or if you want to animate a graphic, select the graphic.

2. On the Animations tab, click the More arrow to open the palette in the Animate group. A selection of animation effect presets appears. See Figure 16-1.

3. Choose one of the effects from the Entrance section.

4. Click the Effect Options button on the Animations tab and select the options to fine-tune the effect. The choices depend on the type of object you are animating and the animation preset you chose in Step 2. Figure 16-2 shows the choices for a text box that has the Float In animation applied, for example.

If the object you chose is a text box, these are the choices for Effect Options:

· As One Object: The entire content of the text box is animated as a single unit.

· All at Once: Each paragraph is animated separately, but their animations occur simultaneously.

· By Paragraphs: The first paragraph of the text appears when you click the mouse, and the next paragraph appears when you click again, and so on.

If the animation you chose involves the content entering from a direction, you can choose the direction from the Effect Options list, as in Figure 16-2.

5. (Optional) To see a preview of the animation you chose, choose Animations ⇒ Preview.

Figure 16-1

Figure 16-2

If you did not like any of the choices for animation effects, choose More Entrance Effects from the palette shown in Figure 16-1. This opens the Change Entrance Effect dialog box (shown in Figure 16-3). Click any of the effects there and click OK.

Figure 16-3

After setting up an animation, there are a number of settings you can adjust for it. The most common change is to set the animation to occur automatically on a time delay rather than having it execute on mouse click. To make this change, do the following:

1. Select the object.

2. On the Animation tab, open the Start drop-down list and choose After Previous.

3. (Optional) If you want a delay between the previous event (such as the slide appearing) and this animation, enter it in the Delay box.

(Optional) If you want to adjust the speed at which the animation occurs, increment the value in the Duration field. (Clicking the up arrow makes it slower; down makes it faster.) See Figure 16-4. The Delay setting delays the animation from starting by a certain amount of time.

Figure 16-4

That’s the basic stuff, but there’s a lot more you can do with animation.

The Add Animation button, also on the Animations tab, enables you to assign more animations to an object. For example, if you already have an entrance animation assigned to an object, you could use Add Animation to also assign an exit effect for it. Its menu is nearly identical to that of the Animation group’s gallery menu.

The Trigger command enables you to set an animation trigger based on some other object on the slide. For example, you could animate a text box so that it appears when the user clicks a certain graphic object on the slide, as in Figure 16-5.

Figure 16-5

Animations play out in the order in which they are created by default. The current animation order is indicated by numbers on the slide, as shown in Figure 16-6.You can use Reorder Animation buttons to change the order. If you have a hard time visualizing the order from the numbers, click Animation Pane to show the animations in a list. There are also Move Earlier and Move Later arrow buttons on the Animation Pane, too.

Figure 16-6

To copy the animation from one object to another, set up one object the way you want it and then choose Animation ⇒ Animation Painter and click the object to receive the animation settings.

For even more control, right-click an animation event on the Animation Pane and then use one of the following commands to further fine-tune:

1. Effect Options: Opens a dialog box where you can choose whether sound will occur with the animation and how the object will appear after the animation has finished. See Figure 16-7.

2. Timing: Opens a dialog box where you can set the start, duration, delay, triggers, and other timing-related settings.

Figure 16-7

Add Slide Transition Effects

Transition effects are much like animations except that they apply to entire slides. A transition effect is the flourish that occurs when you transition between one slide and another. The default transition effect is No Transition, which means one slide simply goes away and another appears, with no flourish at all.

The transition effects you can use include fades, cuts, dissolves, and wipes. It’s difficult to explain each of these effects, but if you see them, you’ll immediately understand them. To try them out, follow these steps:

1. Click the Transitions tab.

2. In the Transition to This Slide group, point at one of the transition effects. A preview of it appears on the active slide. For more choices, click the More arrow to open a palette of more transition effects.

3. When you’re ready to select a transition for a slide, click the transition you want (rather than just pointing at it). It’s immediately applied to the active slide.

4. If the transition has options, the Effect Options button becomes available. Click it and make your choice. See Figure 16-8.

Figure 16-8

Use the Duration field and Sound drop-down list box to the right of the transitions to customize the speed at which the transition occurs and the sound that plays when the transition occurs (if any). Be wary of assigning sounds to transitions, though; in a long presentation, audiences might find them annoying.

Set Slides to Automatically Advance

By default, slides transition from one to another on mouse click, not automatically. If you want the slide show to progress automatically, with a certain amount of pause between slides, on the Transitions tab, mark the After check box, and then enter a number of seconds.

That setting applies only to the active slide, but you can easily apply it to all slides by doing the following:

1. Click in the Slides (left) pane in Normal view, or switch to Slide Sorter view.

Read about views in Chapter 14.

2. Press Ctrl+A to select all slides.

3. On the Transitions tab, mark the After check box, and enter the number of seconds. The change will apply to all slides. See Figure 16-9.

Figure 16-9

At any time, you can test your presentation by going into Slide Show view (choose View ⇒ Slide Show). Press Esc to return to Normal view.

Add a Soundtrack

As your presentation plays, you might want to have music in the background. PowerPoint enables you to specify a digital audio track, such as an MP3 file, on the PC that’s being used to show the presentation and play it in synchronization with the presentation.

Musical soundtracks work best for self-running presentations: that is, those presentations where the slides are set to advance automatically after a certain number of seconds. In a presentation with a live speaker manually advancing the slides, that live speaker is probably also speaking to the audience, and the speech can interfere with the music (and vice versa).

To set up a soundtrack, follow these steps:

1. Select the first slide in the presentation, or the slide on which the music should start playing.

2. Choose Insert ⇒ Audio ⇒ Audio on My PC.

3. Navigate to the location where the audio file is stored. Select it and click insert.

4. Click Audio Tools Playback ⇒ Play in Background. See Figure 16-10.

5. Check your work by viewing the presentation in Slide Show view (by choosing Slide Show ⇒ From Beginning).

Figure 16-10

Choosing Play in Background in step 4 changes several settings, which collectively give you the effect you want. In earlier versions of PowerPoint you had to configure this combination of settings manually, which made it tricky, but now it’s one-click simple.