Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 – Animating Text

Powerpoint Animations

Animating text can spice up an otherwise boring presentation and captivate your audience. If your presentation is self running, you might consider adding more animation than if you were presenting it yourself, but you shouldn’t use so much animation that it detracts from the content. The following kinds of animations are available to you:
Fades
Wipes
Fly ins
Custom animations


Applying An Animation To Some Text

To apply an animation to some text, first of all select your text. Then click Animations > Animations > Animate. The most commonly used effects are displayed here. Hovering the mouse over any of the effects provides you with a temporary live preview, which allows you to see what the effect looks like without actually applying it. When you make your selection, the animation runs again. To the left in the slides pane, animations are indicated by the presence of a small white star.



You can click the star on a slide to run its animation at any time.
Creating A Custom Animation

If you want to deviate from the norm where your animation is concerned, you can create a custom animation. With your text selected, click Animations > Animations > Custom Animation (doing this also allows you to modify animations that are already present). The Custom Animation panel appears on the right of your workspace. This panel gives us more control over the animations we apply to our text. Click Add Effect to add a new animation. From the drop down menu you can choose from the Entrance, Emphasis, Exit and Motion Paths categories, and each category provides further sub categories of effects. It pays to just play around and experiment.



When the effect is applied, you can change its attributes. The attributes available for change depend on the effect that has been applied. For example, the image below shows the attributes you can change when a “Blinds” effect has been applied:



Using the Custom Animation panel, you can build layer upon layer of animations. Just keep clicking the Add Effect button to add more. To change an existing animation, click to select it in the Custom Animation panel and its attributes are displayed for you to amend. You’ll also notice that the Add Effects button transforms into a Change button (see the image above) and this allows you to change the animation to one of the other effects. You can also use the Remove button to delete animations from your text.

As well as using the animations that ship with Powerpoint, you can also take advantage of the third party products that are available. Crystal Graphics, for example, provide a range of TV-style graphics and effects for Powerpoint.