Adding an Animation
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint 2002, 2003, and 2007
Date Created: November 27th 2008
Last Updated: February 25th 2009
Excerpt/Capsule:.
I explained what animation is, and what guidelines you need to follow before you add an animation to a slide object in PowerPoint. You can add animation to any slide object in PowerPoint -- including text, charts, shapes, pictures, clip art, etc.
Follow these steps to add animation to a shape in PowerPoint:
- Open a new presentation, and insert a slide object such as a shapes or a picture, etc. Or open any existing presentation you have, and select the slide object (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Animations tab
- For PowerPoint 2007 users, make sure that the shape is still selected, then activate the Animations tab of the Ribbon -- next click the Custom Animation button (refer to Figure 1) to bring up a task pane of the same name that you can see in Figure 2. Remember, this is a toggle option: click once to show the Custom Animation task pane, and click again to hide it!
Users of earlier PowerPoint versions can again make sure that their shape is selected. Then they should choose Slide Show | Custom Animation to access a similar task pane (see Figure 2 ).
Figure 2: Custom Animation task pane
- In the Custom Animation task pane click the Add Effect button, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Add Effect
- This opens a fly-out menu that lets you select any of the four animation types that PowerPoint provides. For this tutorial, I chose the Entrance option, which opens another fly-out menu that you can see in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Entrance animations
- By default, the recently used animation effects are visible in the Entrance fly-out menu -- to see all the effects available, choose the More Effect option from the fly-out menu, which opens a dialog box, as shown in Figure 5. This contains all the animation effects available in PowerPoint for the selected animation type.
Figure 5: Entrance animation styles
- Choose any of the animation styles to preview the effect. If you are happy with the effect, click the OK button to dismiss this dialog box, and apply the animation to the selected slide object.
- You can add animation types other than Entrance in the same way. Just choose the relevant fly-out menu as required for Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Path animations.
Note: PowerPoint uses the term Custom Animation for animation added to slide objects -- for most practical purposes, the terms "custom animation" and "animation" can be regarded the same.
Tip: If your slide has more than one slide object, you can also add animation effects for all of them using the same process -- remember that any animation added first will play first -- and any animations added thereafter will play in the same sequence as you added them -- yes, you can change this sequence as I will show you in a subsequent tutorial.
Now that you have added an animation to a slide object, you can control more animation properties like event and speed -- I'll cover these in a subsequent tutorial.
