Enhancing PowerPoint Presentations with Animation

• By Lisa Jahred
• Mar 8, 2002
• Article is provided courtesy of New Riders

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Are you bored with that glazed-over look from your audience while giving a presentation? They may be bored with you, too! It's time to spice up those PowerPoint presentations and keep your audience lusting for more. With today's technology, almost anything is possible.

If you're guilty of too many bullets on a slide and text that goes on forever, read on. In this article, I show you how to bring your message and your audience to life with purposeful animation.

Purposeful Animation Defined

We all know what animation is—creating artificial images that move. Those artificial images can be objects or text.

PowerPoint provides you with the capability to animate elements (such as text) included in a slide or transitions from slide to slide. Sometimes however, presenters animate text for the sake of animation only, with no other purpose in mind.

Have you ever had the honor of sitting through presentations that left you woozy from watching the text fly in, out, and every which way in hundreds of slides? That's what I call "animation with no purpose."

On the other hand, text sometimes needs to be animated—just not in every instance. For example, if you have three bullets on a slide that you plan to discuss, you may want the last two bullets to hide while you discuss the first bullet topic. This makes good sense. When you are finished discussing the first bullet topic, you can mysteriously make the second bullet topic appear.

Your audience stays focused on the current item you are discussing rather than reading everything else on the same slide before its time.

This comes in handy for training purposes, as well. While reviewing some software application features listed on a slide, you may want to introduce a tip that wouldn't make sense to appear before you finish that part of the discussion. With just a click of the mouse, the tip appears on screen when you are ready to reveal it!

Charts are also good candidates for animation. Let's say you are presenting a vertical bar chart that shows sales growth over time. With animation, you can display the first bar in the series before revealing, one-by-one, additional growth bars in the series. Each bar is greater than its predecessor, and animation brings this point into focus.

On the other hand, if sales declined over time, animating the bars in a chart brings too much attention to a negative sales story.