Title

A Guide to Using PowerPoint

Part 2

 

 

How to ...

Add an animation effect

One of the most dramatic features of PowerPoint is the ability to animate the entry and exit of items in a slide. See an example

  • To add an animation effect the item to be animated should be selected and right clicked.
  • From the menu 'Custom Animation' should be selected

 

 

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  • From the Custom Animation menu you can then choose to animate the entrance, change the empasis, animate the exit or add a motion path.
  • Choosing Entrance allows you to choose from a variety of effects
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  • In this picture 'Fly in' was chosen.
  • At the top right 'Start, Direction and Speed' are offered. From each you can make appropriate choices.
  • Having made choices of animation you can now preview the animation
  • Choose 'Play' to test the animation in the editing window
  • Choose 'Slide Show' to see the animation in slide show view
  • Putting the tick in the 'AutoPreview' box will automatically show you animations as you add/change animations
Text as well as images may be animated
  • In the 'Modify:' area, right clicking in one of the numbered areas allows you to choose 'Efect Options...'
  • This gives you a further window with more options:

Create your own background image

It is possible to use an image as a background image. The trick, however, is to use an image which text will show up against. It may be that you can use a colour for the text which is not present in the background image but it's better to modify the image by fading or washing it out. That way the user is not distracted from the content of the presentation by the background image.

How to produce a washed out background image was covered in Unit 6 Creating a faded background image. For a PowerPoint presentation, a large size is not important since PowerPoint will scale the image as necessary. An image 800 x 600 in size is ample.

Modifying an image for use in a slide animation

For the Tanks page of a World War II presentation this picture of a World War II tank was found.

It was decided that the page would be more effective if the picture could be split into two parts - a battlefield and a tank. The tank would then be animated to roll onto the battlefield scene from the right. This was done in PaintShop Pro in two stages:

Both of these are techniques used in the 'Retouching tutorial'

Create your own sound

For the Tanks page of a World War II presentation a sound of a World War II tank was needed. Most sounds can be found on Internet by searching but in this case nothing suitable could be found to go with this picture:

a sound was needed with machine gun fire, a tank moving and a tank cannon firing. The sound needed to be about 12 seconds long.

Searching on Internet found machine guns, an explosion and the sound of a bulldozer! Audacity, a free program from Source Forge, was then used to create the sound required.

"All things are difficult before they are easy."- Thomas Fuller

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