Animating Text and Objects on a Slide
Just as you use transition effects to control how a slide fades in, you use animations to control how the individual elements of a slide make their appearance. By showing one bullet point at a time, for example, you can make sure your audience concentrates on what you're saying now rather than reading the rest of the bullets on your slide and mentally calculating how much longer you're going to speak.
The most rudimentary form of slide animation displays each bullet point on a slide one at a time: You click the mouse and the slide's title appears. Click again, and the first bullet point appears onscreen. Keep clicking to display each bullet point on the list. Other animations let you specify that bullet points fly in or zoom from any direction. You can also choose fades, dissolves, wipes, and other visual effects.
You can apply animations to almost any part of a slide, and then activate the animations by clicking the mouse or using PowerPoint's built-in timers. Used sparingly, these animations can add punch to your presentation, augmenting your spoken words with powerful visuals. Say you have a graph that illustrates how sales have taken off in the past year. You could show the whole graph, all at one time, and emphasize the spike in the final number verbally. Much more effectively, however, you could have the bars fly onto the graph one at a time—building up, in your narration, to the spike in the final quarter.
You can use animations to coordinate sounds, so they play as predetermined parts of the slide appear. You can also place text on a slide, one character, word, or paragraph at a time. For example, use animations to start movies and other types of video clips at predetermined intervals after the slide first appears. Or use them to dim or change the color of items on the slide, in conjunction with the appearance of a new item.
Tip from 
For sophisticated animation effects, break the clip-art objects apart, and then animate each element separately. Duplicating elements and using flying effects can also create the illusion of motion.
Animating Bullet Points
Animating the arrival of bullet points on a slide gives you control over how much information your audience sees, and when. Moving one bullet point at a time onto the slide lets you keep your audience running at your pace, particularly if you know that people in the audience have a tendency to read ahead. Also consider using bullet animation if you want to save some surprising or emphatic points for the end of the slide.
Caution
If you remove the capability to advance a slide based on mouse clicks (by unchecking the On Mouse Click box shown earlier in Figure 31.1), you also remove the capability to animate bullet points with a mouse click. Instead, if you've provided an automatic advance time (in the Automatically After box), PowerPoint divides that time equally among the bullet points, and presents each in turn, automatically.
If you check the Automatically After box in Figure 31.1, PowerPoint will show each of the bullet points automatically if you don't click soon enough. Here, too, each bullet point is given an equal amount of time.
Tip from 
If you have animated bullet points, don't forget to show them as you're making the presentation! You would be amazed how many presenters talk "to" multiple animated bullet points on a slide, show the first point, and then forget to click to put the other bullet points on the screen so their audience can follow along.
To animate "flying" bullet points the easiest way, choose from the Animation Schemes on the Slide Design pane:
Bring up the Slide Design panel's Animation Schemes by choosing Slide Show, Animation Schemes (see Figure 31.2).
Figure 31.2. Animation schemes are on the Slide Design pane.
Select the slide or slides you want to take on the specified animation. Ctrl+click to select single slides, Shift+click to select a contiguous group, or press Ctrl+A to select all the slides. Select the animation you prefer from the Apply to Selected Slides list.
Look at the first slide you selected to see a preview of the slide's transition, followed by the animation. If you want to see the transition and animation again, click the slide's Preview transition and animation button, which is just below the slide on the left.
PowerPoint's collection of built-in animation effects is impressive, but if you don't see the animation effect you want, you can create your own. For example, you can bring in second- and lower-level bullet points one at a time, or specify that bullet-point text should appear onscreen one word or character at a time. To build your animation from scratch, use the Custom Animation pane.
→ To go it on your own, see "Advanced Animation".
Tip from 
If you want your transitions and animations to appear when your presentation is viewed from a Web browser, you must choose Tools, Options, General, Web Options, and check the Show Slide Animation While Browsing box.
Animating Titles
The trickiest part of animating a title lies in understanding precisely when the animation will take place. When you click to advance to a slide with an animated title using preset animations, your presentation proceeds in one of two ways (assuming the Slide Master itself isn't animated):
If the Bullet Points Are Not Animated— The background appears, along with all the slide's bullet points. Shortly thereafter, the title appears, using the chosen animation. You don't have to click.
If the Bullet Points Are Animated— The slide background appears. Shortly thereafter, the title appears, using the animation you specified. Click to display the first bullet on the slide. Click again to show each succeeding bullet.
It's easy to animate titles by using most of the preset animations available on the Slide Design pane's Animation Schemes list.
The easiest way to apply one of these preset animations to a slide's title is via Animation Schemes:
In Normal or Slide view, select the slide whose title you want to animate.
If the Slide Design pane is not visible, click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar. Click Animation Schemes.
Choose one of the dozens of effects in the Apply to Selected Slides list. As soon as you choose the animation, watch the selected slide to see what the animation entails.
By creating a custom title animation, you can go far beyond the preset choices here: Arrange for the title to appear after the bullet points, for example, or have the characters or words in the title appear, one after the other. To create your own, use the Custom Animation pane.
→ For details on animations, see "Advanced Animation".
Advanced Animation
In the preceding two sections, you saw how to apply PowerPoint's prebuilt animations with titles and bullet points. This section shows you how to build custom animations, again concentrating on bullets and titles.
PowerPoint offers an enormous variety of ways to animate items on a slide. For example, what if you want top-level bullet points to appear onscreen first, followed one at a time by second-level bullets? Every one of PowerPoint's preset animations displays an entire high-level bullet point and all the lower-level points below it at the same time. Follow these steps to create a custom effect:
In Normal view, bring up the slide that contains the bullet points you want to animate. This exercise is more effective if you have bullet points at both the first and second levels.
Choose Slide Show, Custom Animation. The Custom Animation pane appears (see Figure 31.3).
Figure 31.3. To build a custom animation from the ground up, start with the Custom Animation pane.
Select the items on the slide you want to animate. In Figure 31.3, the slide's body text is animated, but the slide's title is not, so the text placeholder (which contains all the bullet points) is selected.
Click the Add Effect button and choose the effect you want. An Entrance effect called Fly In is used in Figure 31.4.
Figure 31.4. PowerPoint has hundreds of animation effects. For each element of a slide, you can pick the entrance motion, font effects (marked Emphasis), exit motion, or you can apply any motion that you can draw.
PowerPoint shows the first animation—in this case, the bullet point that starts with "Show pictures of TDD…"—in the timing review list. Click the downward-pointing chevron below the first animation, and PowerPoint shows you all the bullet points and their sequence (see Figure 31.5). The timing review list indicates that on the first mouse click, the first bullet ("Show pictures of TDD…") appears. On the second mouse click, four more bullet points appear. And on the third click, the last bullet point appears.
Figure 31.5. The timing review list shows what each mouse click will do. Sequence numbers to the left of the bullet points repeat that information.
Each bullet point should appear in turn—six mouse clicks, each of which is to bring up one bullet point. Click the first unnumbered bullet point ("Training collar"), select the down-arrow to the right, and choose Start On Click (see Figure 31.6).
Figure 31.6. You can adjust the appearance of each bullet item individually.
Continue in this manner until all the bullet points have their own sequence numbers, 1 through 6 (see Figure 31.7).
Figure 31.7. Each bullet point appears in turn, as indicated by the numbers 1 through 6.
Finally, to verify your choices, click the Slide Show button at the bottom of the Custom Animation pane. The heading should come up as soon as the slide appears. Click once, and the first bullet point comes up. Click again and you get the second bullet point, and so on. This level of control is not available in any of the standard Animation Schemes.
Note
There is no way to apply separate animations to individual bullet points on a slide. For example, you can't have the first bullet point wipe from the left, and have the second spiral from the top.
Tip from 
Of course, if you absolutely must make bulleted list items fly from all directions, you can create pictures that look just like bulleted items. Then you can animate each, any way you like. That increases the size of the presentation, which can be a problem if your presentation has to be sent via e-mail, or shown over the Web.
When you make a presentation, any item on the slide that isn't animated shows up as soon as the slide hits the screen. Animated items appear next, normally in top-to-bottom order. Sometimes you don't want the slide's elements to appear from top to bottom, however; you might have a picture that you want to appear before the bullets, or a video clip that should show before the title comes up. Using the Custom Animation pane, you can control the order in which animated items appear.
To arrange the order in which animations appear
In Normal view, select the slide with the animations that need to be ordered.
Choose the items on the slide you want to animate, as in Figure 31.3.
On slides with two text placeholders, you must animate each placeholder separately. That poses a slight restriction on your ability to design a presentation, because it means all the bullets in one placeholder must go up on the screen before you can start showing bullets from the other placeholder. But this feature also offers a clever way to use different animation effects for each set of bullets on a slide: Just use a different animation for each placeholder.
→ To alter slide layouts, see "Choosing a Slide Layout".
If one of PowerPoint's preset Animation Schemes is close to the effect you want, use it as a starting point for customization. Apply the Animation Scheme, and then open the Customize Animation pane to modify it slightly.
For example, if you like the Boomerang and exit Animation Scheme, but want it to apply to both first- and second-level bullets, try this:
In Normal view, select the slide you want to animate.
Choose Slide Show, Animation Schemes. On the Animation Schemes pane, choose the Boomerang and exit scheme.
Change to the Custom Animation pane (by, say, clicking the down arrow to the right of Animation Scheme and choosing Custom Animation). You'll see all the components of the Fly in and fade in scheme, detailed in the timing review list.
Click to the right of the first bullet point you want to Fly in, and choose Start On Click.
If you're frustrated because you can't copy custom animation effects from slide to slide, see
"Custom Animation Tricks"
in the
"Troubleshooting" section at the end of this book.
Tip from 
To add a custom animation to every slide, animate the Slide Master. You can apply any animation effect to any item on the Slide Master—title, text, background pictures, date/time, footer, and slide number. You can also animate the Title Master.
To coordinate the arrival of each character in a title with a sound (say, a typewriter clacking), here's how you coordinate sounds with characters:
In Normal view, select the slide whose bullet points you want to animate. Bring up the Custom Animation pane (choose Slide Show, Custom Animation).
Choose the item you want to animate—for example, the title. Click Effects, and choose Entrance, Color Typewriter.
In the timing review list, click the down arrow to the right of the title, choose Effect Options, and choose Typewriter in the Sound box (see Figure 31.8).
Figure 31.8. The Color Typewriter Animation Scheme allows you to play a sound announcing the arrival of each character.
When the title appears on the slide, each character flies in, accompanied by the sound of a typewriter.
Animating the Drawing Layer
PowerPoint lets you animate any items in the drawing layer—text boxes, drawings, AutoShapes, clip art, charts, embedded Excel or Word objects, org charts, and more. Before you try, however, it's important that you understand how the drawing layer works, and how to use it in conjunction with the Custom Animation dialog box.
→ To add pictures to the drawing layer, see "Working with the Drawing Layer".
→ For an overview of animation, see "Advanced Animation".
Say you've created a dramatic slide that features the company's mascot, a collie. You've scanned a photo of the mascot, and you want the photo to "dissolve" onto the screen with applause—and you hope the audience will join in. Here's how:
Select the slide and add the new picture.
Click Add Effect, Entrance, More Effects, and then choose Fade (see Figure 31.9).
Figure 31.9. If you select an item on a slide and then choose an animation, PowerPoint applies only the animation to the selected item.
Click the down arrow in the timing review list next to the picture. Choose Effect Options. In the Sound box, pick Applause. Now when the slide appears on the screen, the picture of the dog will "fade in," accompanied by the sounds of four paws clapping.
Use similar techniques to animate any object on the drawing layer. For example, you might want to have a text box that says "Met Year 2002 Goals!" on top of a slide showing financial information, animated to appear after you've had a chance to talk about the numbers. Custom animations also let you introduce text in AutoShape callouts or text boxes one word or letter at a time.
Hiding and Uncovering Slide Contents
There's a trick to using items in the drawing layer that all too frequently escapes PowerPoint users. If you carefully match the color of a shape in the drawing layer to the color of the background, you can use animation on these shapes to hide parts of your presentation.
Say you have a slide that includes an organizational chart, and you want to unveil each member of the organization, one at a time. PowerPoint offers only basic options when it comes to organizational charts, in noteworthy comparison to the long list of fancy effects you can accomplish with charts you create with Excel or Microsoft Graph. Here's how to use animations to show one piece of the org chart at a time:
Create the slide and organizational chart. For best results, make sure the slide's background is a solid color.
Click the Rectangle tool on the Drawing toolbar. Draw a rectangle around the top box in the org chart, extending down so that it covers the vertical line at the bottom of the box. If you have trouble covering the rectangle precisely and need more control, hold down the Alt key as you drag.
Click the Fill Color icon. Select the color that most nearly matches the background color.
Click the Line Color icon. Select the same color you selected in the preceding step.
Repeat steps 2, 3, and 4 to draw rectangles around each box, including appropriate sections of the connecting lines.
Choose Slide Show, Custom Animation, and bring up the Custom Animation pane. Click all the Rectangles and choose whatever Animation Effect suits your fancy. In the timing review sequence list, arrange the order so the first Rectangle is the last in order. Use the Effect Options choices to add any additional effects (applause, for example).
The presentation will now reveal each piece of the org chart when you click the mouse.
Animating Chart Components
You can animate every piece of a chart separately. For example, to dramatically demonstrate five years of steady growth, try sliding each bar in the chart up from the bottom of the slide, one after the other. To focus on your progress versus a competitor, show the bars for the competitor first, and then reveal the corresponding bars for your company.
Before you undertake this advanced animation, make sure you understand how to create a chart in Excel or Microsoft Graph, how to insert a chart into a slide, and how to use the Custom Animation dialog box.
→ To create a chart in Excel, see Chapter 24, "Creating and Editing Charts".
→ To put a chart in a slide, see "Inserting an Excel Chart or Range".
→ For tips on Custom Animation, see "Animating Text and Objects on a Slide".
To animate an Excel chart, you must put the chart in a slide's chart placeholder—charts inserted in an object placeholder, or put on the drawing layer, can't have their components animated. To put an Excel chart in a chart placeholder
Create the chart in Excel. It's easiest if you put it on its own Chart Sheet.
Bring up the slide in PowerPoint, and use the Slide Layout pane to apply a Content or Content & Text layout.
Click the chart placeholder in the middle of the upper row. PowerPoint responds by creating a dummy chart and spreadsheet using Microsoft Chart.
Choose Edit, Import File, and navigate to the workbook that includes the chart. Click Open.
In the Select Sheet from Workbook box, choose the sheet that includes the chart. Click OK.
Note
Bringing an Excel chart into PowerPoint in this way severs all ties with Excel. You cannot double-click the chart and edit it in Excel.
→ For the most elementary type of charts, see "Creating and Editing Charts and Diagrams".
→ To take full advantage of your animation options, see "Advanced Animation".
To make each bar of a bar chart appear independently on the screen
Open the slide that contains the chart. Select the chart and choose Slide Show, Custom Animation. You'll get the Custom Animation pane.
Choose Add Effect and pick an Entrance effect such as Diamond.
Click the down arrow next to the Chart in the timing review list and choose Effect Options. On the Chart Animation tab, choose the method you want to use to Introduce Chart Elements: The chart can come in all at once; by Series (that is, all similarly colored bars appear, followed by all bars with the next color, and so on); by Category (each group of bars that falls into one group on the y-axis appears, and then the next group); or by individual bars within each Series or Category (see Figure 31.10).
Figure 31.10. Individual bars in a chart appear in the sequence defined on the Chart Animation tab.
Test your animation by clicking the Play button.
Because PowerPoint gives you the capability to present data by Series or Category, the animation sequence for chart effects can be complex. Use the Play button as you work to make sure the order is correct.