First some catch-up. Everyone who uses slide presentation software should regularly check their show in show mode. This is the end product. You need to see what it looks like and how it works. Hopefully you did this on the last assignment with buttons and interactivity. The easy way to check your show is with the show button in the bottom left. It’s the button that looks like this: (Use the Esc key to exit the show and get back to working mode.)

PowerPoint Animation (screen shots are from PowerPoint 2007) Did you know you can use your arrow keys to go to the next and previous slide?

PowerPoint animation features have had significant upgrades in the past couple versions of the software. Even though PowerPoint would not be considered “animation software”, there are a lot of ways to be creative with the tools and options that are available. First you need an object to animate, like the ball on this slide. Select the ball object and open the top menu Animations tab. The Custom Animation option is your doorway to the power in PowerPoint.

With the object selected and the custom animation window open, start by selecting a general effect from these 4 options. Each has additional options. Play around with these Effects. Some are better than others. Some are visually annoying if overused. You can add as many effects as you want to a single object, they can play one right after another. A typical sequence would be an entrance effect and an exit effect, with time in between the two if desired.

The Draw Custom Path effect allows you to draw a custom motion Path. Select the ball and try it.

After choosing an animation effect, the effect will show in the animation list. Options such as direction and speed may be available. After selecting an effect that has been applied, use the right side arrow for the drop down menu. The is how you start getting control of the animation effect. Select the ball, try changing the effects and options related to the effect. Then click the Play button to see the effects. Select this ball and see the effect s that have been applied to it in the Custom Animation panel.

Remember that animation would not exist without time passing. When you click Play you should see these orange bars and a moving vertical blue line. The blue line is passing through time and the orange bars represent the amount of time and how effects occur in relation to time and each other. This is where you can see and change the timing of multiple animation effects.

Selecting Timing in this drop down menu gives you more options for setting up your animation. This very important option is how you make the animation play on mouse click or automatically.

By selecting Timing, you’ll get to this window. The Start options are: On Click With Previous After Previous You can have as many animated objects on a slide as you want. They will all be listed in the Custom Animation window. If you want two different objects to animate at the same time, choose With Previous. If you want objects to animate automatically in sequence, chose After Previous.

The real POWER in PowerPoint animation is in the Advanced Timeline. With the Custom Animation window open, right-click any one of the 4 listed Oval effects, and select Show Advanced Timeline from the drop-down menu.

See if you can get to the advanced timeline. See if you can make the four balls all move up at the same time. Hint: you may need to expand your view of the Custom Animation window. Move the cursor to the left edge of the window until it becomes a double ended arrow. Then drag the window to enlarge it. You can also drag the listed effects in the Animation window to change their order.

The advanced timeline is like a timeline for audio – time is shown on the horizontal axis. You can change timing locations, adjust durations, and change objects so their movement overlaps rather that following in sequence as shown in the above screen shot. There is a lot of power here, a little awkward to work with compared to higher level animation software, but it is PowerPoint, and not intended to be a full animation software. You can grab and move the orange bars and adjust orange bar lengths which changes the animation timings. The best way to understand this is to just play with it, make changes, try new things.

The next few slides are students PowerPoint animations. The techniques are creative and innovative. Run this slideshow as a show now to see the animations. Then you can come back to this view and reverse engineer a slide to see how it was done. When you come back to this view, go to the eel swimming through kelp slide. See if you can make the eel swim between the kelp by moving the middle kelp behind the eel. This will increase visual depth in the slide. The animation slides also have some sound effects so you might want to turn down your speakers to start. When you are ready, click the slideshow button down in the right bottom of the PPT window. Then click anywhere in this slide to go to the animations. Enjoy.

Over the wall

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