Powerpoint is designed to produce professional looking presentations that can be used in almost any business situation.  It has some powerful features that should impress.  Adding animation can add a further dimension to your presentation, although beware – making a presentation too “busy” with animation, colour or using many different fonts can have a negative effect on your audience – try to be subtle when using these features.

However, it is very easy to add a little movement to a presentation, and the following will allow you to do just this.  We will look at just two simple features – Slide Transitions and Slide Animations.  The screenshots shown here are taken from Powerpoint 2003.  Although these features are available in earlier versions of Powerpoint, they may look slightly different.

Slide Transitions

This feature allows you to specify the type of transition from one slide to the next.  You will find Slide Transitions under the SLIDESHOW menu item, where you select SLIDE TRANSITION. 

This produces a panel (see above) that allows you to select from any one of a large number of transitions – these can be a simple fade or “dissolve” from one slide to the next, or a more complex blind effect – there are many to choose from. 

The speed at which the transition takes place can be modified (fast, medium or slow), and a sound can be added to the slide during transition.  The sound facility must first have been installed on your computer and Powerpoint will offer to install the feature if it is not.

You can then decide how you want to move from one slide to the next.  This can be manual, by clicking on the mouse, or automatically, in which case you need to specify the time delay (in minutes/seconds) before the show advances to the next slide.

Finally, you can apply these settings to all slides in your presentation if you wish, and then play just the one slide or the entire presentation, using the settings you have just applied.

Slide Animation

This feature allows you to animate the various objects on your slide – these objects can be blocks of text (with or without bullet marks or images etc.

There are a number of ways of applying animation to the objects on your slide(s).  Using a built-in Animation Scheme is the easiest, since it applies the selected scheme to all textual elements on your slide (the Title and Body text) – it does not however apply them to other objects – images etc.  Alternatively, you can apply a set of customised animations to each and every object on your slide.  However, this naturally takes some time, since each object has to be selected individually, and the appropriate animation effect applied to it. 

To select either of these two alternatives, Select either ANIMATION SCHEMES or CUSTOM ANIMATION from the SLIDESHOW menu item.

Animation Schemes

The panel that appears when you select this option is very similar to all other panels used in Powerpoint 2003 (there will be differences in earlier versions, and not all the options may be available).  The built-in Animation Schemes are categorised as “Subtle”, “Moderate” or “Exciting”, depending on the required “mood” for the presentation.  The effects that each produces are too numerous to describe here, but you can apply any of the schemes and judge whether it is appropriate for your needs.  The effects only apply to the textual elements of the presentation slide. Once you have selected the scheme that you want, you can apply it to all slides at the click of one button.  You then have the option to play the presentation to see the overall effect.

Custom Animation

This feature allows you to apply a range of effects to the text, graphic or sound elements of your presentation and vary timings and sequences etc.  In the Custom Animation panel, a list of each element on the page is shown in a list form.  Clicking once on each element produces a number of options for the effects that can be applied to that element – these include when the element appears, from which direction on the screen and the speed.  In the case of sound elements (these can be applied using a number of sound format files that you insert into the page) – you can specify whether the sound plays once, or is “looped”, and whether it plays automatically, or when the mouse is clicked.  Again, the permutations are extensive and too numerous to cover in this article.  Experimentation can produce some interesting effects though! 

If you require assistance in making your presentations more effective, please give Alan Finch a call on (01224) 697457.