Jan's PowerPoint Formatting: Animations

You have a wide choice of animation effects, including many that are similar to the transition effects. Too many to list here!

There are three aspects of your objects that can be controlled with animations. You can combine these to create complex behaviors.

You can apply animations using a pre-set animation scheme or create a custom animation from the various choices.

Not too much: A cute and interesting effect can quickly become highly annoying when used too often!

Animation Schemes

PowerPoint has a number of pre-set combinations of animations and slide transitions, called animation schemes. The animations apply only to the standard placeholders on a slide. Objects like textboxes, images, and charts may inherit the body text animation. If they do not, you must create a Custom Animation for each such object.

Animation Schemes are found in the task pane as a choice on the Slide Design task pane. On the Slide Show menu, Animation Schemes...

will also open this task pane.

At the top of the pane are schemes used recently, then No Animation. Below those are all of the available animations, grouped as Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting.

What effects are in an Animation Scheme?
Hover over an animation scheme in the task pane. A popup tip will tell you what animations and transitions will be applied to which placeholders!

Choosing No Animation will remove your slide transitions as well as any animations applied to the selected slides. However, if you remove an animation scheme, any objects that had inherited animations before may still have those animations! So confusing!!! You can remove those unwanted animations in the Custom Animation task pane.

Custom Animation

If none of the existing animation schemes suit you or if you want to animate something besides a placeholder, you can create a Custom Animation.

Custom Animation is a choice in the drop list at the top of the Task Pane. It is also on the Slide Show menu

With a custom animation you can be very selective. You can apply the animation to selected objects on the slide, to a placeholder, or to just a paragraph. You also choose whether to play the animation automatically or after a delay or only after a click.

The animations you select are listed in the task pane in the order in which they run. A matching numbered square appears in the Slide Pane next to the slide part that is animated.

Text animation: You can apply most text animations either letter by letter, word by word, to the whole paragraph at once, or to the whole placeholder at once.

Configure a Custom Animation

You can control how an animation behaves from the task pane or from a popup menu.

AutoAdvance: For a slide show to run automatically, all animations must run either with or after the previous animation, plus slide transitions must advance on a timer also.

Property: For most animations you can modify a property, like the direction of the motion, the font style or color, or the degree of rotation.

Step-by-Step: Animations

What you will learn:

to apply an animation scheme
to apply a custom animation
to modify a custom animation in task pane
to modify a custom animation with Effects dialog
to remove an animation
to apply animations to the Master slide

Start with: Anniversary Trips Offer4.ppt from the Class disk

Apply Animation Scheme

Open Anniversary Trips Offer4.ppt from your Class disk. (NOT the autorun version you created last in the previous lesson which was saved as Anniversary Trips Offer4-auto.ppt.)
From the menu select Slide Show | Animation Schemes...
The Task Pane changes to the Slide Design pane, with the 3rd choice, Animation Schemes, displayed. (It's a bit confusing to have 3 choices on the Slide Design task pane plus more in the task pane drop list!)
Select the first two slide thumbnails at the left.
Click on a scheme in the list and then on the Play button at the bottom of the task pane. The Slide Pane runs the animation scheme you chose, but just for Slide #1.

What happened to the Newsflash transition that you applied to Slide #1?? The animation scheme has changed the slide transition also. Unexpected!
Select Slide #1 and click the Slide Show button. Advance the slide show by clicking the screen. The slide transitions and animations play. But wait! Nothing is happening on Slide #2 to the Actual text.

The bullet point Actual and sub-point under it are in a second placeholder.

How to tell: Right click on the box and the popup menu shows the command Format Placeholder.

The AutoContent wizard set it up that way when you created the presentation. The animation schemes recognize only one Body text placeholder on a slide. Another unexpected complication!

A custom animation applied to the slide will work for both text placeholders. You will create one in the next set of steps.
Experiment by trying out each of the animation schemes in the list. Can you guess from the names what the motion or change will be?
Close the presentation without saving any of your changes. (You may not be able to Undo enough to get rid of all the changes.)

Apply Custom Animation

You have a lot of control and more choices when you create a custom animation. The effect you pick is applied to the parts of the slide that are currently selected. The disadvantage is that you cannot apply the same effect to different slides at the same time.

Reopen Anniversary Trips Offer4.ppt.
Show Slide #2 in the Slide Pane.
Click on the word Goal, hold the SHIFT key down, and click on the word Actual. Now both placeholders are selected.
If necessary, show the Task Pane and then open the Custom Animation task pane from the drop list at the top of the task pane.
Click on the Add Effect button to open a menu. You have four choices: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, Motion Paths. Each of these will open a list of choices.
Hover over Entrance. A list of commonly used effects appears, with a link to More Effects... at the bottom.
Click on the choice Fly In. The default configuration of this effect is applied to your selected placeholder and the effect immediately plays in the Slide Pane. It is easy to miss seeing the preview.
If you do not see Fly In in the numbered list of Entrance effects, click on More Effects... at the bottom of the list and look through the expanded list.

PowerPoint 2002 - 2 animations
Run after a single click

PowerPoint 2003 - three animations.
Run after a single click

The Custom Animation task pane now shows multiple animations in the list, but only the first one is numbered. The placeholders in the Slide Pane are all labeled with the a gray box showing the number 1 . All of the objects with the same number run their animations at the same time.
Click on the Play button to see the effect in the Slide Pane.

The text in both placeholders moves into view all at once from the bottom of the slide.
Click on the Slide Show button to view the actual show.

The preview of animation effects in the Slide Pane never waits on a click. Always check the Slide Show itself to be sure the effect is behaving the way you intended.

Modify Custom Animation: Task Pane

The default settings for a custom animation may not do quite what you'd like to see. You can change a number of behaviors about an animation.

Click on the number 1 beside the Goal placeholder in the Slide Pane. The animation in the list in the Task Pane now has a blue border.
Change the Direction to From Right.

Only the changed animation will play in the Slide Pane, not the whole sequence for the slide.
Repeat for the animation of the second line - Offer to 200 frequent/high volume customers
Click on the number 1 beside the Actual placeholder in the Slide Pane.
Change its Direction to From Right also.
Change its Start setting to On click. The animation is now numbered 2 in the list, showing that it is part of a separate animation sequence. Now the second placeholder's text will not show up until you click.

PowerPoint 2002 - 2 separate animations
Click to run each.

PowerPoint 2003 - 3 separate animations
Click runs first two. Click again to run last one.

Modify Custom Animation: Effects Options

The Effects Options dialog offers even more control over an animation effect than the Task Pane.

Click the arrow at the right end of animation #2 (for Actual) in the list in the task pane to open the menu. (Or right click the item in the list.)
From the menu select Effect Options... A dialog appears with tabs. What tabs and choices you see will vary, depending on what animation has been applied.
On the Effect tab, change the item Animate text to By letter and click on OK. The Slide Pane runs a preview of the changed animation.

Evaluate: Do you like this effect? Is it helpful? Interesting? Annoying?

Remove Custom Animation

Let's suppose that you decide you don't like the changed animation. You can dump the whole thing with the Remove command, but you may lose more than you expected.

Select the second animation in the list.
Click on the Remove button at the top of the task pane. The whole animation is gone.
Click on the Play button to see how the animations are working now. Whoops. That's not quite what we need. We do want the Actual text to fly in. Maybe Undo can save the day.
Click on the arrow at the right of the Undo button on the toolbar to open the list of actions. You may see quite a number of Custom Animation items in this list.
Click on the first Custom Animation at the top. You should be back to where you were before you changed the effect to By letter.
Check the change: Click the Play button to preview the slide's animations. If you went back too far, click the Redo button. If you have not gone back far enough, click the Undo button again. Play the slide animations again. Keep trying until you get the correct effect. (If you get entirely too frustrated, you can always re-create the animation!)

Apply Custom Animation to Master

Now that you have created a custom animation, you should use the same animation on the other slides. There is no way to copy and paste this formatting of animations. Happily, you can apply your animation to the Master.

Open the Master View.
Select the body text placeholder.
Apply the Fly In effect with -
Start: On Click
Direction: From Right
Speed: Very Fast
Play the animation. All of the bullet levels fly in together. Not what we wanted.
Hold the SHIFT key down and click on each of the number squares EXCEPT the first one.
In the Custom Animation task pane, change the Start setting to After Previous. All the selected animations are changed.
Close the Master View.
Play the Slide Show. Look carefully at how Slide #2 plays. The custom animation you applied to the first placeholder is running in addition to the animation from the Master. Odd effect!
Return to Normal view.
Select Slide #2 again and look at the list of animations. At the top is a new entry- Master: Body. You no longer need the animation you applied earlier.
Remove each of the animations in the list below Master: Body.

You cannot delete animations applied by the Master slide from here. If you want to do something different on a particular slide, you could:
- Apply a different Master to the slide.
  OR
- Open the menu for the effect and choose Copy Effects to Slide and make the changes that you want.
Play the Slide Show again. All should work as planned now. If not, go back and fix any errors.
Save As Anniversary Trips Offers5.ppt to your Class disk.
How to handle a full Class disk

PowerPoint Formatting:
Animations

Why use animations?

Animation Choices