Adding animations

You can use PowerPoint’s animation capabilities for many different purposes, the most useful of which is probably setting items on your slide to appear at different times. For example, you could make each bullet point appear as you discuss it, make an image appear suddenly, or play an audio/video file when you are done reviewing the notes on the slide. You can add as many animations as you want to each slide.  You can even have more than one animation on a single item. 

How to animate a slide object

To get to the Animations menu, go to >Slide Show - Custom Animation.  Your task pane (or pop-up menu in older versions) should now be displaying the animation options.  To animate something, you need to:

1. Select the slide item you want to animate by clicking on it once.  (To animate text, you can select the whole text box by clicking on its edge, or just part of the text by dragging your cursor over it).

2. In the task pane, click on Add Effect.  You will then get a drop-down menu that looks like this:

3. For your first animation, click on Entrance.  Then find Appear (it may be in the More Effects option) and click on it.  Your item will now be invisible when you first show the slide, and it will appear when you click your mouse anywhere on the screen.

4. You are supposed to be able to preview what this will look like by clicking on Play at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, but this doesn’t always work.  If you want a better preview, click on the Slide Show button next to Play.  To get out of the slide show, hit the ESC key at any time.

I won’t describe all the different animations in this manual, since it is easier just to play around with them and see what they do.  There are numerous ways of making things appear, move around the screen, distort themselves, and disappear. 

Changing or deleting existing animations

You can organise the order of the animations on a slide by dragging them up and down in the task pane.  Change any single animation by clicking on it once and then clicking Change in the task pane.  Delete animations from the task pane by clicking on them once and hitting the Delete key (this gets rid of the animation, but not the original object).

Making two objects animate at the same time

If you want two of your animations to start at the same time (e.g. if you want a picture and a line of text to appear together), select the second animation the task pane by clicking on it.  Then pull down the Start menu just above it, and change On Click to With Previous.

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