PowerPoint Part 2 - animations and transitions Author: James Morgan

PowerPoint part 2 - Animations and Transitions

Congratulations you have created your first PowerPoint presentation it’s looking great the sound files are playing like they should everyone’s impressed except you because you have to stand there and click the mouse to make the slide move on to the next you can’t sit back and enjoy it with everyone else. Never fear in this lesson we will explore transitions and timings, what this allows us to do is to make the presentation more animated and fluid and more importantly run it ‘self so you can sit back relax and enjoy the show.

To do this is easier than you may think but does require a little fore-thought I.e. do you want to say anything about the current slide? Did you add a music track which you would like to play the whole way through before moving on just these little things can make a big difference to how your presentation flows.

So with that in mind let’s start making your presentation work for you.

To make your presentation come alive and be dynamic you can select each element individually and give it it’s own animation. What this means is that you can make each one appear in turn let’s try an example.

Firstly select the element you would like to apply the animation to then at the top of the page select the animations tab, this will give you a host of animation options let’s try float in

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PowerPoint Part 2 - animations and transitions Author: James Morgan

Once you done that you can left click on the preview button in the top left corner to see the animation play. At this point the animation will play at its default setting but you can change this quite quickly and easily. In the top right corner of the screen you will see an option which says, start, duration, delay.

The start option will be set to on click you can leave that as it is if you wish or you can change it to with previous or after previous what this does is set the animation to start automatically within the presentation. You can also set how long the animation lasts for (this is in seconds) and also if you would like a time delay between the elements to give it that dynamic edge. Once again when you have made your selections click preview and this will show you the affects your changes have made you may want to increase or decrease the length of time the animation plays for or indeed the length of the delay, simply adjust these within the previous menu option until you get it just right.

As mentioned before you can give each element its own setting or if you like once you have perfected the animation on the first element you started editing you can apply this to every element within your presentation. To do this left click on the animation painter option on the top right, then simply left click on all the elements you want to apply the changes to (see picture below).

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PowerPoint Part 2 - animations and transitions Author: James Morgan

Once you’ve done that you find you aren’t happy with the order that the elements appear in, never fear you don’t have to undo all the hard work you have done and start again you can simply reorder the animations by selecting each one in turn and clicking the move earlier or move lateroption in the top right corner.

Once you’re happy with all that it’s now time to create the transitionfrom slide to slide. This process is very similar to the animations so yo should now feel more comfortable working within these options. So to create our transitions, left click on the transitionstab at the top of the screen and the list of options availiable will be there to select. So again lets try an example for this we will use the uncoveroption.

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PowerPoint Part 2 - animations and transitions Author: James Morgan

Simply left click on the uncover option and then left click the preview option as before to view how the transition will play. You can then choose whether to add a sound to this if you wish to do so simply left click the sound option then choose one of the sounds available or you can choose a sound from your files by selecting other sound. Now select the duration option and increase or decrease the length of time it takes for the transition to complete (again this is in seconds). Once your happy again you can apply these changes to every slide within the presentation by left clicking the apply to all option. So we’re almost done adding and editing animations and transitions to your presentation, there’s just one more set of options to explore to keep your presentation flowing and that’s the advance slide option.

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PowerPoint Part 2 - animations and transitions Author: James Morgan

By default the slides are set to change when you click the mouse, but you can change this to keep your presentation flowing and reducing the work you have to do while showing it. To do this simply uncheck the on mouse click option by left clicking on the box, this will then let you check the after option and you can choose (in seconds) how long you would like each slide to stay on screen It’s a good idea to have kept a note of how long each slides animations and/or sound files will last as these will affect your decision as to how long you want each slide to last however don’t worry too much as you can always use the preview option to give you the best idea of how you want the presentation to run and also you can use the slide show tab and select the from beginning option, this will play the whole presentation for you allowing you to see how it flows and make any necessary adjustments. And that’s it your slide show is ready to go, so sit back and enjoy your hard work well done.

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