PowerPoint 2016 For Dummies (2016)
Part II
Creating Great-Looking Slides
See how to add recurring text or other elements to each of your PowerPoint slides at www.dummies.com/extras/powerpoint2016.
In this part …
Find out how to stun your audience and receive ooohs and aaahs from the crowd by formatting text and giving your slides a spectacular appearance.
Get familiar with PowerPoint themes that allow you to create good-looking slides in minutes.
Explore how to use slide transitions and animations to make even the dullest content look amazing.
Discover how to utilize Masters, the surefire way to add something to every slide.
Chapter 9
Animating Your Slides
In This Chapter
Creating slide transitions
Animating text
Working with custom animations
Setting animation timings
Creating jiggle text
If you plan to run your presentation on your computer’s screen or on a computer projector, you can use (or abuse) a bagful of exciting onscreen PowerPoint animations. The audience members probably won’t be fooled into thinking that you hired Disney to create your slides, but they’ll be impressed all the same. Animations are just one more example of how PowerPoint can make even the dullest content look spectacular.
This chapter begins with slide transitions, which are not technically animations because they don’t involve movement of individual items on a slide. However, slide transitions are usually used in concert with animations to create presentations that are as much fun to watch as they are informative.
Using Slide Transitions
A transition is how PowerPoint gets from one slide to the next during an onscreen slide show. The normal way to segue from slide to slide is simply cutting to the new slide — effective, yes, but also boring. PowerPoint enables you to assign any of the more than 50 different special effects to each slide transition. For example, you can have the next slide scoot over the top of the current slide from any direction, or you can have the current slide scoot off the screen in any direction to reveal the next slide. You can have slides fade out, dissolve into each other, open up like Venetian blinds, or spin in like spokes on a wheel.
You can control slide transitions by using the Transitions tab of the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 9-1.
Figure 9-1: The Transitions tab.
The Transitions tab consists of three groups of controls, as described in the following list:
· Preview: This group includes a single control — a Preview — that displays a preview of the transition effect you selected for the current slide.
· Transition to This Slide: This group lets you select the transition effect that will be used when the presentation moves to this slide.
· Timing: This group lets you select options that affect how the transition effect is applied to the slide, such as how quickly the transition occurs and whether it’s triggered by a mouse click or automatically after a time delay.
To create a slide transition, follow these steps:
1. Move to the slide to which you want to apply the transition.
Note that the transition applies when you come to the slide you apply the transition to, not when you go to the next slide. For example, if you apply a transition to slide 3, the transition is displayed when you move from slide 2 to slide 3, not when you move from slide 3 to slide 4.
If you want to apply the animation scheme to all your slides, you can skip this step because it won’t matter which slide you start from.
If you want to apply different transitions to different slides, you may prefer to work in Slide Sorter View (click the Slide Sorter View button near the bottom-right corner of the screen), which allows you to see more slides at once. If you’re going to use the same transition for all your slides, though, no benefit comes from switching to Slide Sorter View.
2. Select the transition you want to apply from the Transition to This Slide section of the Transitions tab on the Ribbon.
If you want, you can display the complete gallery of transition effects by clicking the More button at the bottom right of the mini-gallery of transition effects displayed within the Ribbon. Figure 9-2 shows the complete Transitions gallery.
Note that when you select a transition, PowerPoint previews the transition by animating the current slide. If you want to see the preview again, just click the transition again.
3. Use the Effect Options drop-down list to select a variation of the transition effect you selected in Step 2.
The available variations depend on the transition you’ve chosen. For example, if you choose the Wipe transition, the following variations are available:
· From Right
· From Left
· From Top
· From Bottom
· From Top-Right
· From Bottom-Right
· From Top-Left
· From Bottom-Left
4. If you want, use the Sound drop-down list to apply a sound effect.
The Sound drop-down list lists a collection of standard transition sounds, such as applause, a cash register, and the standard whoosh. You can also choose Other Sound to use your own .wav file.
5. Use the Duration drop-down list to control how fast the transition should proceed.
The default is 1 second, but you can specify a slower or faster speed if you want.
6. Use the On Mouse Click or After options to indicate how the transition should be triggered.
If you want to control the pace of the slide show yourself, select the On Mouse Click check box. Then, the slide will remain visible until you click the mouse. If you want the slide to advance automatically after a delay, select the After check box and specify the time delay.
Figure 9-2: The Transitions gallery.
To apply the animation to the entire presentation, click Apply to All. This applies the animation to all the slides in the presentation.
Here are some additional points to keep in mind when using slide transitions:
· Consider computer speed: Transition effects look better on faster computers, which have more raw processing horsepower to implement the fancy pixel dexterity required to produce good-looking transitions. If your computer is a bit slow, change the speed setting to Fast so the transition won’t drag.
· Select sets of transitions: Some of the transition effects come in matched sets that apply the same effect from different directions. You can create a cohesive set of transitions by alternating among these related effects from slide to slide. For example, set up the first slide with Wipe Right, the second slide with Wipe Left, the third with Wipe Down, and so on.
· Preview transitions: When you work in Slide Sorter View, you can click the little star icon beneath each slide to preview the transition for that slide. Also, the automatic slide timing is shown beneath the slide if you set the slide to advance automatically.
Using the Animations Tab
Besides slide transitions, the most common type of animation in PowerPoint is adding entrance and exit effects to the text that appears on the slide. This effect is especially useful for bullet lists because it lets you display the list one item at a time. You can have each item appear out of nowhere, drop from the top of the screen, march in from the left or right, or do a back somersault followed by two cartwheels and a double-twist flip (talc, please!).
This type of animation is often called a build effect because it lets you build your points one by one. It’s easy to apply this type of animation using the Animations tab of the Ribbon, shown in Figure 9-3.
Figure 9-3: The Animations tab.
The Animations tab consists of four groups of controls, as described in the following list:
· Preview: This group includes a single control — a Preview button — that displays a preview of the animation effects you selected for the current slide.
· Animation: This group lets you select one of several predefined animations for the selected object.
· Advanced Animation: The controls in this group let you create custom animations with features that the basic animations provided by using the Animation group. For more information, see the section “Customizing Your Animation,” later in this chapter.
· Timing: This group lets you set the timing of the animation. For more information, see the section “Timing your animations,” later in this chapter.
To apply an animation effect, first select the text box that you want to animate. Then, choose the animation style from the Animation gallery on the Animations tab.
Like other PowerPoint galleries, the Animation gallery includes a More button (at the bottom right) that summons the complete gallery, as shown in Figure 9-4.
Figure 9-4: The Animation gallery.
After you apply a basic animation, you can use the Effect Options drop-down list to select one of several variations of the animation. For example, if you choose the Fly In animation, the Effect Options drop-down list lets you pick the direction from which the object will fly on to the slide.
Notice that there are several More… menu items at the bottom of the Animation gallery. You can click any of these buttons to reveal even more preanimation types.
For more complex animations, you need to use custom animations as described in the next section, “Customizing Your Animation.”
Customizing Your Animation
Custom animation is the nitty-gritty of PowerPoint animation. Custom animation is the only way to apply text animation that’s more complicated than the predefined Fade, Wipe, or Fly In styles of the Animate drop-down list. In addition to animating text, custom animation lets you animate other objects on your slides, such as pictures, shapes, and charts.
Understanding custom animation
Before I get into the details of setting up custom animation, you need to understand some basic concepts. Don’t worry — this won’t get too technical. But you need to know this stuff before you start creating custom animations.
For starters, you can apply custom animations to any object on a slide, whether it’s a text placeholder, a drawing object such as an AutoShape or a text box, or a clip art picture. For text objects, you can apply the animation to the text object as a whole or to individual paragraphs within the object. You can also specify whether the effect goes all at once, word by word, or letter by letter. And you can indicate whether the effect happens automatically or whether PowerPoint waits for you to click the mouse or press Enter to initiate the animation.
Custom animation lets you create four basic types of animation effects for slide objects:
· Entrance effect: This is how an object enters the slide. If you don’t specify an entrance effect, the object starts in whatever position that you placed it on the slide. If you want to be more creative, though, you can have objects appear by using any of the 52 different entrance effects, such as Appear, Blinds, Fade, Descend, Boomerang, Bounce, Sling, and many others.
· Emphasis effect: This effect lets you draw attention to an object that’s already on the slide. PowerPoint offers 31 different emphasis effects, including Change Fill Color, Change Font Size, Grow/Shrink, Spin, Teeter, Flicker, Color Blend, Blast, and many more.
· Exit effect: This is how an object leaves the slide. Most objects don’t have exit effects, but if you want an object to leave, you can apply one of the 52 different effects — which are similar to the entrance effects — Disappear, Blinds, Peek Out, Ease Out, Spiral Out, and so on.
· Motion path: Motion paths are the most interesting types of custom animation. A motion path lets you create a track along which the object travels when animated. PowerPoint provides you with 64 predefined motion paths, such as circles, stars, teardrops, spirals, springs, and so on. If that’s not enough, you can draw your own custom path to make an object travel anywhere on the slide you want it to go.
If the motion path begins off the slide and ends somewhere on the slide, the motion path effect is similar to an entrance effect. If the path begins on the slide but ends off the slide, the motion path effect is like an exit effect. And if the path begins and ends on the slide, it is similar to an emphasis effect. In that case, when the animation starts, the object appears, travels along its path, and then zips off the slide.
To draw a custom motion path, click the Add Effect button in the Custom Animation pane, choose Motion Paths Draw, and then choose Draw Custom Path and select one of the motion path drawing tools from the menu that appears. The tools include straight lines, curves, freeform shapes, and scribbles. You can then draw your motion path using the tool you selected.
You can create more than one animation for a given object. For example, you can give an object an entrance effect, an emphasis effect, and an exit effect. That lets you bring the object onscreen, draw attention to it, and then have it leave. If you want, you can have several emphasis or motion path effects for a single object. You can also have more than one entrance and exit effect, but in most cases, one will do.
Each effect that you apply has one or more property settings that you can tweak to customize the effect. All the effects have a Speed setting that lets you set the speed for the animation. Some effects have an additional property setting that lets you control the range of an object’s movement. (For example, the Spin effect has an Amount setting that governs how far the object spins.)
If you want, you can create a trigger that causes an animation effect to operate when you click an object on the slide. For example, you might create a trigger so that all the text in a text placeholder pulsates in when you click the slide title. To do so, first add the animation effect to the text. Then, click Trigger in the Advanced Animation group and choose On Click Of. A list of all objects on the slide that can be clicked is displayed; select the Title placeholder. (You can also trigger an animation when a specific location is reached during playback of a video file. For more information, refer to Chapter 15.)
Using the Animation pane
The Animation pane is a task pane that appears to the right of the slide and displays important information about the animations you have added to your slides. The Custom Animation task pane is hidden by default, but I recommend you turn it on before you start adding custom animations to your slides. To turn on the Custom Animation task pane, just click the Animation Pane button in the Advanced Animation section of the Animation Ribbon tab.
Figure 9-5 shows how the Animation pane appears for a slide that has not yet had any animations added to it.
Figure 9-5: The Animation pane.
In the sections that follow, you find out how to use the Animation pane as you create custom animations.
Adding an effect
To animate an object on a slide, follow these steps:
1. In Normal View, call up the slide that contains the object you want to animate and then click the object to select it.
For example, to animate text paragraphs, select the text placeholder that holds the text.
2. If you haven’t already done so, click the Animation Pane button.
This step opens the Custom Animation task pane.
3. Click the Animations tab on the Ribbon.
4. Click the Add Animation button and then select the effect you want to create from the menu that appears.
Clicking the Add Animation button menu reveals a menu that lists the four types of effects: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Path. In this example, I chose the Bounce entrance effect.
The entrance effect you selected is added to the Animation pane, as shown in Figure 9-6.
Note that each of the paragraphs in the text placeholder has been assigned the number 1 or 2 to indicate the sequence in which the paragraphs will be animated. In the Custom Animation pane, the animation that was added in Step 4 is given the single number 1; number 2 doesn’t appear in the pane. That’s because although this animation is applied to two separate paragraphs, it is treated as a single animation in the Custom Animation pane.
However, if you click the double-down arrow beneath the animation, the two separate paragraph animations will be listed individually, as shown in Figure 9-7.
5. (Optional) Use the Effect Options control to select additional options for the effect.
To set the effect options, click the down arrow to the right of the animation for which you want to set effect options; then choose Effect Options from the drop-down menu (not the Effects Options button in the Ribbon). This brings up a dialog box that lets you choose options for the effect you’ve selected. For example, if you choose a Fly In effect, you can specify the direction from which you want the text to fly.
6. To preview the animation, click the Play button at the bottom of the Custom Animation task pane.
Or, if you prefer, just run the slide show to see how the animation looks. If nothing happens, click the mouse button to start the animation.
Figure 9-6: The Animation pane after an animation has been added.
Figure 9-7: Text paragraphs can be listed separately in the Custom Animation pane.
If you add more than one effect to a slide, the effects are initiated one at a time by mouse clicks, in the order you create them. You can drag effects up or down in the custom animation list to change the order of the effects. For more information about changing the order or setting up automatic effects, see the “Timing your animations” section, later in this chapter.
You can further tweak an effect by clicking the down arrow that appears next to the effect in the custom animation list and then choosing Effect Options. Doing this brings up a dialog box similar to the one shown in Figure 9-8. This dialog box has settings that let you add a sound to the animation, change the color of the object after the animation completes, and specify how you want text animated (All at Once, One Word at a Time, or One Letter at a Time). Depending on the type of effect, additional controls might appear in this dialog box.
Figure 9-8: The settings dialog box for an animation effect.
More about animating text
The most common reason for animating text is to draw attention to your text one paragraph at a time while you show your presentation. One way to do this is to create an entrance effect for the text placeholder and then adjust the effect settings so that the entrance effect is applied one paragraph at a time. When you do that, your slide initially appears empty except for the title. Click once, and the first paragraph appears. Talk about that paragraph for a while and then click again to bring up the second paragraph. You can keep talking and clicking until all the paragraphs have appeared. When you click again, PowerPoint calls up the next slide.
Another approach is to use an emphasis effect instead of an entrance effect. This sort of effect allows all the paragraphs to display initially on the slide. When you click the mouse, the emphasis effect is applied to the first paragraph — it changes colors, increases in size, spins, whatever. Each time you click, the emphasis effect is applied to the next paragraph in sequence.
Either way, you must first add the effect for the text placeholder and then call up the Effect Settings dialog box by clicking the down arrow next to the effect in the custom animation list and then choosing Effect Settings. Doing this summons the settings dialog box for the text object. Click the Text Animation tab to see the animation settings, shown in Figure 9-9.
Figure 9-9: Animating text.
The Group Text setting, found on the Text Animation tab of the Animation Settings dialog box, controls how paragraphs appear when you click the mouse during the show, based on the paragraph’s outline level. If you have only one outline level on the slide, grouping By 1st Level Paragraphs will do. If you have two or more levels, grouping text By 1st Level Paragraphs causes each paragraph to be animated along with any paragraphs that are subordinate to it. If you’d rather animate the second-level paragraphs separately, group your text By 2nd Level Paragraphs instead.
The other controls on this tab let you animate each paragraph automatically after a certain time interval or display the paragraphs in reverse order.
Timing your animations
Most animations are initiated by mouse clicks. However, you can set up several animations to activate automatically — in sequence or all at the same time. To do so, you must use PowerPoint’s Animation Timing features.
The first trick to controlling animation timing is to get the effects listed in the custom animation list in the correct order. Effects are added to the list in the order you create them. If you plan carefully, you might be able to create the effects in the same order that you want to animate them. More likely, you’ll need to change the order of the effects. Fortunately, you can do that easily enough by dragging the effects up or down in the Custom Animation task pane.
After you get the effects in the right order, choose an option from the Start drop-down list that’s near the top of the Custom Animation task pane to set the Start setting for each effect. This setting has three options:
· Start On Click: Starts the effect when you click the mouse or press Enter.
· Start With Previous: Starts the effect when the effect immediately above it starts. Use this option to animate two or more objects simultaneously.
· Start After Previous: Starts the effect as soon as the preceding effect finishes.
Starting with the first effect in the list, click each effect to select it and then choose the Start setting for the effect. If all the effects except the first are set to With Previous or After Previous, the entire slide’s animations run automatically after you start the first effect by clicking the mouse.
For example, Figure 9-10 shows a slide with three polygons drawn to resemble pieces of a puzzle. You can animate this puzzle so that the three pieces come together at the same time.
Figure 9-10: An animated puzzle.
If you want to find out how to draw the shapes that are animated in this illustration, you can look ahead to Chapter 12.
Follow these steps to set up an animated puzzle like the one shown in Figure 9-10:
1. Add a Fly In entrance effect for the top-left piece with the following settings:
· Start: On Click
· Direction: From Top-Left
· Duration: 2 Seconds
2. Add a Fly In entrance effect for the top-right piece with the following settings:
· Start: With Previous
· Direction: From Top-Right
· Duration: 2 Seconds
3. Add a Fly In entrance effect for the bottom piece with the following settings:
· Start: With Previous
· Direction: From Bottom
· Duration: 2 Seconds
For even more control over an effect’s timings, click the down arrow to the right of the effect and then choose Timing. A dialog box similar to the one in Figure 9-11 appears. Here’s the lowdown on the timing settings:
· Start: This is the same as the Start setting in the Custom Animation task pane.
· Delay: This lets you delay the start of the animation by a specified number of seconds.
· Duration: This is the same as the Speed setting in the Custom Animation task pane.
· Repeat: This lets you repeat the effect so that the object is animated several times in succession.
· Rewind When Done Playing: Certain effects leave the object in a different condition than the object was when you started. For example, the object might change color or size or move to a new position on the slide. If you select the Rewind When Done Playing option, the object is restored to its original condition when the animation finishes.
Figure 9-11: Establishing the timing settings.
Making Text Jiggle
One of my favorite cute little animations is to make text — especially a short heading — jiggle. Not a lot, but just a little. The effect works best if the text has a funny typeface, such as Cosmic or Jokerman. By using a very small motion path and setting the timing options to repeat until the end of the slide, you can make the text jiggle just a little bit the entire time the slide is onscreen:
1. Type the text that you want to jiggle and use the Font drop-down list to choose an appropriately silly typeface.
Jokerman is a favorite font for jiggling text.
2. Use the Zoom control at the bottom-right corner of the screen to zoom in to 400%.
You want to zoom way in so that you can draw a very small motion path.
3. On the Animation tab, click Add Animation and then choose Custom Path from the Motion Paths section of the gallery. (You probably have to scroll the gallery to see this option.)
The cursor changes to a little pencil.
4. Draw a tightly knit scribble pattern directly in the center of the text.
Just wiggle the pencil cursor back and forth and up and down in an area of just a few pixels. Go back and forth quite a few times to make the jiggle effect appear to be random.
5. Zoom back out to normal size.
6. In the Custom Animation task pane, click the arrow next to the animation you just created and then choose Timing.
This step brings up the dialog box that lets you set the timing options.
7. Change the speed to 2 seconds and the Repeat drop-down to Until End of Slide. Then click OK.
8. Run the slide show to check the effect.
You might have to try this several times before you get an effect you like, adjusting the random scribbles or the duration of the animation. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
Using the Animation Painter
The Animation Painter makes it easy to copy a complete animation effect from one object to another. To use the Animation Painter, follow these steps:
1. Use the techniques presented throughout this chapter to apply an animation effect to one of the objects in your slide show.
2. Select the object you have animated.
3. In the Custom Animation group of the Animation Ribbon tab, click the Animation Painter button.
The mouse pointer changes to a little paintbrush.
4. Click the object you want to apply the animation to.
The animation that you created for the object selected in Step 2 is applied to the object you clicked on in this step.
If you want to apply the animation to more than one object, double-click the Animation Painter button in Step 3. Then, you can repeat Step 4 as many times as you wish to copy the animation to multiple objects. When your animation frenzy has come to a close, press the Esc key.