Kathy's Practical PowerPoint Tips
~~Kathryn Jacobs, PowerPointAnswers

Animating Text in Your Presentations

The most basic way of having your say in a PowerPoint presentation is to use text in a bulleted list placeholder. Microsoft has graciously provided basic placeholders for formatting bulleted lists, both single column and double column. These placeholders allow you to add the text quickly and easily, and ensure that the text shows up in your outline. Furthermore, these placeholders are set up so that the text displayed in the placeholders can be built a character, word, line or bullet at a time.

Text entered in one of the bulleted list placeholders is great for drawing attention to one part of the information at a time. To set up your animations, use the "Custom Animation" item on the "Slide Show" menu. This tool lets you assign which animations you wish to use on the placeholder. You set up how you want the placeholder to appear, exit, and (in PowerPoint 2002 only) move around the screen. Once you have defined the basic animation, you are ready to define the animation for the bulleted text itself.

When you enter text in a placeholder, you are setting up a bulleted list. This list can either be a straight list, such as:

• Level One, bullet one
• Level One, bullet two
• Level One, bullet three

Or it can be made up of nested lists such as:

• Level One, bullet one
  • Level Two, bullet one
  • Level Two, bullet two
    • Level Three, bullet one
• Level One, bullet two

Nested lists are nice when you need to provide just a bit more detail than you could on a single bullet item. But they are very easy to abuse. Even though PowerPoint will let you set up a total of 5 indentation levels, please think carefully before going beyond two. The further indented the text is, the smaller it is, the less space you have to say what you need, and the harder it will be for your audience to stay focused.

Bulleted lists are animated by using animation options. The basic options you choose from are text grouping and text effects. Use the grouping to determine how many levels you want to appear at a single reveal. In our list above, we could select from the following options:

• As one object - All text in the placeholder revealed at the same time.
• All paragraphs at once - Each bullet revealed in order, regardless of bullet level.
• By 1st level paragraphs - All the nested bullets for the 1st level revealed at the same time as the 1st level text, repeated for each level one bullet.
• By 2nd level paragraphs - The first 1st level bullet revealed, the first 2nd level bullet revealed with all of its nested bullets, then the next 2nd level bullet. When all 2nd level bullets are revealed, then the next 1st level bullet is processed.
• By 3rd level paragraphs - Same idea as above, but with one more level of grouping.

How much grouping you do depends on what you want the audience to see at any given time during your presentation. If you want the audience to concentrate only on the current sub-bullet, then use a very tight grouping level. If you want them focusing on the bigger picture, then use a looser grouping level. (Most presenters use 1st or 2nd level grouping.)

Once you know how much text to bring in at once, you can determine the order. The order of the bullets can be either top to bottom (the default) or bottom to top (reverse). Be careful about combining reverse reveals with tight grouping. It can be confusing to your audience.

Are you ready for another level of enhancement? Good. Next we are going to define what we want to happen as the text is brought in. You have three decisions here:

• If you want a sound played when the text is brought in, which sound to play
• What you want to have happen to the text when you bring in the next bullet
• How fast you want each bullet brought in

These options are found on the "Effect" tab of the animation scheme. We are going to look at these in reverse order, as that is how you really set it up.

How fast text is brought in is determined by the "Animate Text" option. This option lets you bring your bullets all at once, a word at a time or a character at a time. Think about your screen as a typewriter, and you will have the idea for character at a time. Word at a time is slightly less spread out across time, all at once is just what it says. For word or character at a time, you also need to determine how long you wish to wait between characters/words before the next one appears.

Next, you should define what you want to happen when the next bullet appears. This is the "After Animation" option. You can choose any of these four options:

• Do nothing to the text
• Change the color of the current text as the next text appears
• Blank out the current text after it finishes animating and then bring in the new text
• Blank out the current text on the next mouse click and then bring in the new text

As each of these options is applied to the text box, you must choose one option for the entire placeholder. You cannot mix these effects within a single animation. Also, while you can set the sound to play and the amount of text to animate for exit effects, you cannot set dimming animations.

Finally, you need to decide if you are going to play a sound with each set of text that you have animated. You can choose any of the predefined sounds from the drop down list, or by choosing "Other Sound" you can select your own sound from your hard drive.

But what if you don't want all your text lined up in nice neat bulleted lists?

You can use text boxes (also known as autoshapes) for those text elements which you want to place at other locations around the slide. This text can be animated to appear element by element and move around the screen. There are two downsides to using text boxes:

• Text in the boxes does not appear in your outline
• Text in the boxes can not be "built", unless you are using PowerPoint 2002

To use text boxes to animate your text, place text boxes around your screen and use the "Edit Text" option on your right click menu to add your text. You can add any amount of text you wish to a text box, from single characters to multiple paragraphs.

When you have added all your text elements, your next step is to remove the shapes from those text elements you wish to merely show on the screen. To do this, select the shapes and go to the "Format AutoShape" selection on your right click menu. On the "Colors and Lines" tab, select no line and no fill. Your text will now sit directly on the background of your slide, just as it does when you place it in the placeholders.

Since the text is in a text box instead of a placeholder, it would appear that you do not have as many animation options as you would on a placeholder. However, because of the flexibility of the text boxes, you can fake the grouping options, the dimming options and the sound options by creating individual text boxes for each paragraph, line, or word of text you wish animated. This actually gives you more flexibility than you have with the placeholders. (If you are using PowerPoint 2002, you can apply all of the text animations and building options to text boxes as well as to the placeholders.)

There is one other point you should know about text and PowerPoint. You cannot build placeholders. You can fake them by creating sample slides with the text boxes in places you desire them, but you cannot create "Click Here" boxes. This means that if you are creating presentation templates for others to use, you must be sure to explain how to use and recreate your text box scheme when you distribute your template.

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Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote
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Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is time for.

I believe life is meant to be lived. But, if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived.