1. Part 1. Animation in PowerPoint Part 2. Some features in Excel
IAP Lecture
Part 1. Animation in PowerPoint
Part 2. Some features in Excel
by Jim Orlin
The slides are available on my website: web.mit.edu/jorlin/www/talks.html
PowerPoint notes are available with many of the slides.

2. Introductions
How familiar are you with PowerPoint and what do you hope to learn?
Here I asked people who they are and what they would hope to get out of the lecture. I wrote things down using the Tablet PC.

3. My Goal Have some fun Present some cool features Help people out
Not a goal: focus on basic instruction in PowerPoint and Excel

4. Why I Love PowerPoint I have a poor memory
Ability to focus attention of class
Animation
Ability to organize a lecture (and help with timing)
Animation
In animation, an “object” is animated. Here, I wrote 6 different text boxes with the word “animation”, and grouped them using the group command from the draw toolbar. You can choose to have the draw toolbar shown by selecting “Toolbars” from the View menu, and then clicking on the draw toolbar. There are a number of other useful toolbars as well. Afterwards, the entire group was animated using the “spiral” effect.

5. But Some People Hate PowerPoint
Usually, in PowerPoint, one makes the objects appear in a direct manner. However, in this case, the Dilbert cartoon was a single object. To make it appear as three separate panels, I hid the cartoon behind three different boxes, each with no outside line, and each colored the same as the background. Then I had the three boxes disappear one at a time.
This effect is very useful if one wants to have material on a slide that does not appear in the notes. If I print out a notes page, no one can see the Dilbert cartoon, but it appears during the lecture. In class, I use it to hide the “quote of the day” so that students do not read them from their notes. I also can hide answers to questions that I ask in class. I reveal the answers after students have had a chance to respond.
PowerPoint Is Evil
Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.
By Edward Tufte

6. Overview of Lecture First Half: PowerPoint basic techniques
More advanced algorithm animation
Second Half: Excel
cool effects for classroom presentations

7. How to Illustrate Concepts (or not)
Difficulty in illustrating PowerPoint: there are tons of PowerPoint Effects. Some can be entertaining the first time.
But they quickly lose the effectiveness.
And they can be distracting and/or boring.
In general, I include lots of material on slides, but preferably it is mixed with graphics. Reading word for word is very boring. Often I will say what is on a slide before it appears. That makes it more interesting, but the material is still available for students afterwards.
The bounce effect is popular, but I only use it a few times per semester.
A common PowerPoint recommendation is to not have too much on slides. This makes sense. But generally, I like it when students only need to take one or two notes per slide. It permits them more time to focus on the lecture.
And clip art doesn’t substitute for ideas.
And reading what is on the slide can irritate audiences.

8. Algorithm Animation
Powerpoint has lots of animation tools that are useful for illustrating concepts.
Colors and transitions can simulate movement.
Boxes can appear, and disappear.
In this talk, I did not show any graph or network algorithms animated. But I have a number of animated algorithms that are available from
If you scroll down, you can access the animations from the list of lectures.
And one can use real movement.
And pictures can help.

9. Using Custom Animation
Step 1. Select Custom Animation from the Slide Show Menu.
Step 2. Select the item(s) to be animated.
Step 3. Click on the add affect button
Step 4. Add the effect.
Boxes can appear, and disappear.
The point of this slide is that many animation effects are simple to use.
There is a learning curve on using animations, and the reader should be forewarned that a major challenge is figuring out what to animate and when. Using animation profligately can be distracting, and not useful educationally.

10. Adding Animation to Each Slide Easily
Select “Master” from the view menu.
Select Slide Master
Format title and other text styles
Add custom animation
Select Text Animation
Group text if desired
If all you want to do is animate bullet points on every slide, this slide describes a very simple way to do this.

11. On grouping text This animation effect is a wipe from left
it is grouped by second level paragraphs
third level indents appear at the same time as second level ones.
fourth level appear at the same time as second level
Next: Illustrating some more advanced techniques
It can be frustrating when the text does not animate in the correct way. It might all appear at once even though you want it to appear one bullet point at a time. If one selects the animated object from the custom animation box and then clicks on the right button for the object and then clicks on “effect options” and then clicks on “text animation” one can choose to have the text appear either by first or second or third level paragraphs. Microsoft really should make this feature easier for users to find.

12. class exercise: how many can you pack?
What is the maximum number of diamonds that can be packed on a Chinese checkerboard?
This is one of my favorite PowerPoint examples from It illustrates a number of different aspects of optimization. Here it also illustrates how one can use visualization in PowerPoint to convey some interesting mathematical concepts.
class exercise: how many can you pack?
Each diamond covers 4 dots.

13. Here is a best possible 27 diamonds.
I explain how to do the animation later on.
27 diamonds.

14. Computing an upper bound
Assign each circle (or node) a “weight.”
The weight of a diamond d is w(d) = the sum of its node weights.
An upper bound: total weight such that for each diamond d, w(d) ≥ 1.
I use the packing of diamonds (which originally came out of an exercise in the MAA journal) to illustrate both linear programming duality and the importance of adding “cuts” in cutting plane techniques in integer programming. Fortunately, one does not need to understand either linear programming or integer programming to understand this example.
Assigning ¼ to each circle gives a total weight of
Can you do better?

15. Here are 27 diamonds .3 .2 .5
What is the weight of the circles covered by diamonds?
The diamond in the right hand corner illustrates the value of visual examples. I usually explain that the weight of each diamond has to be at least 1. But seeing it visually is a big help for students nonetheless.

16. Each diamond has weight at least 1.
Node Weight 1
1/2
1/3
1/6 18 1 24 6
Each diamond has weight at least 1.
Andreas Schulz introduced me to this example. In his presentation, all circles were the same size, and only the colors reflected their difference. Making the circles of different sizes makes it easier to see the connection between the circles and the weights. The size of the circles has nothing to do with animation; rather, it points out that there can be value to different ways of representing information.
The number of diamonds is at most 27.

17. A technique for animation creation
Select diamonds in the order that you want them to appear.
Animate them
Select the animated elements
Select “start after previous” or “start on click”
If you want to animate lots of objects using the same animation effect (in this case a “dissolve”), then one create the effects more quickly by selecting the objects all at once. This technique can be of value to those who animate lots of objects on the same slide.

18. Carrying out movement Select the item.
Add a movement effect with custom animation
Movement is very helpful for illustrating algorithms. However, movement can also be distracting if it is used just for the purpose of bringing attention to the slides.

19. Illustrating matrix operations.
Adding a row of a matrix to another row 1 3 2 5 -1 6
Add row 1 to row 2.
Have the answer appear by wiping down at medium speed. 9 3 5 1 4 5
One of my favorite effects is to use a “wipe down” in order to replace one number in a box by another number. This effect is very simple, but has a nice visual feel. I typically make the color of the new box slightly different so that students’ eyes are brought directly to the correct place on the slide.
Or speed it up, as in adding row 1 to row 3.

20. Illustrating Binary Search
I am thinking of a number x between 1 and 64. You have 6 guesses. If you guess y, I will tell you if x  y or x > y. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64
This slide works by having a table covered up by rectangles that are colored the same as the background and also with no outside lines. The rectangles appear one at a time, but give the appearance that the objects in the table are disappearing.

21. A cool macro for hiding things or possibly making them appear1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
I obtained this macro from
Each box from 1 to 12 has a macro assigned to it that makes it disappear when clicked during a presentation. There is a different macro in the “put back boxes” that makes every object reappear in the entire presentation. (It only applies to objects that disappeared using the first macro.)
The macro here are very simple, and there should be no problem using it. But test it out first. Make sure that you can make objects reappear using the macro since the first macro makes them disappear from slides. 10 11 12
Put back
boxes

22. MIT
Course
Numbers
Category
Heading
Category
Heading
Category
Heading
Category
Heading
100
100
100
100
100
200
200
200
200
200
300
300
300
300
300
This slide works using hyperlinks, which can be created using the “insert hyperlink” command from the “insert” menu.
Only the slides for MIT Course numbers exist.
One advantage of hyperlinks is that they change color once they have been used.
If you select “slide design” from the “format” menu, and then click on “Color Schemes”, you can change the color of hyperlinks. I changed the color of the font so that it is the same as the background. Thus the numbers seem to disappear after a link is followed.
400
400
400
400
400
500
500
500
500
500

23. Chemical Engineering What is Course 10?
The button on this page is an “action button” taken from the “slide show” menu. Its default setting is to return to the slide that immediately preceded it in the viewing of the slide show. In this case, and in the following slides, they return to the “Jeopardy main page.

24. Nuclear Science and Engineering
What is Course 22?

25. Linguistics and Philosophy
What is Course 24?

26. Biological Engineering
What is Course 20?

27. The two numbers from 1 to 24 that do not correspond to MIT Courses
What are 19 and 23?

28. Questions?

29. Excel How familiar are you with Excel and what do you hope to learn?
After this slide, I opened the Excel spreadsheets. Additional notes are on those spreadsheets.

30. IAP Excel Spreadsheets
Overview
Use of relative and exact positioning.
Conditional formatting
The family feud (appear and disappear)
Paste Special Command
The birthday problem, illustrating lots of things
IAP Excel Spreadsheets
Independent 1’s

31. Questions?
Thanks for being a great audience.