Need to make content appear, change or disappear
out of order? Need to control the order that things appear while in
front of your audience? Playing games? You need to play with
PowerPoint’s Triggers option for custom animations. Added with
PowerPoint 2002, this option allows you to control animations via mouse
clicks as well as along a time line.
What can be triggered?
Any animation or effect can be triggered. This
includes the activation of a sound or a movie as well as the appearance,
disappearance, and change of any slide element.
Trigger example
For our example, we are going to create a slide
with a series of photos that appear when text boxes are clicked. We know
that some of the users know what the items are already, but we want to
make sure they have a chance to see each item anyway.
When we click a box to reveal a picture, we want
the picture to appear. We then want the picture to disappear when the
next text box is clicked. The basic steps we are going to do are:
- Add the pictures.
- Animate each picture to appear on mouse click and disappear on
the next mouse click.
- Add the text boxes with the name of each pictured item.
- Change the entrance animation for each picture to be triggered.
Add pictures
The first step is to add 6 pictures to the slide,
using Insertà Picturesà
From file. Multi-select three of the pictures and move them to the
right side of the slide. Multi-select the other three and move them to
the left. Once they are in the correct area of the slide, stack them one
on top of each other. Once all the pictures were inserted, my slide looked
like this:
Animate each picture
To animate the pictures, select all the pictures
and bring up the custom animation pane (Right click, Custom Animation or
Slide Showà Custom
Animation). From the Add Effect Menu, do an Entranceà
Appear. This adds the “Appear” animation to all of the pictures. While
the pictures are still selected, do Add Effectà
Exità Disappear. Your
animation pane should look somewhat like this:
Notice that all of the entrance effects (the green
stars) are set up to happen on the same mouse click and all of the exit
animations (the red stars) also set for the same mouse click. What’s
more, all of the entrances will happen at once and all of the exits will
happen at once. We don’t want this, so we need to rearrange the
animations so that the order is Entrance, Exit, Entrance, Exit, etc. To
do this, click on the first exit animation and use the re-order buttons
on the bottom of the Custom Animation pane to move it up the list until
it is just under the matching entrance animation. (You can also click
and drag the animation if you find that easier.) Repeat this for each
exit animation and your list will now look like this:
We are getting there, but we still have a problem:
The pairs need to enter and exit on consecutive mouse clicks, not all on
the same mouse click. To do this, click the third animation and change
the “Start” drop down to “On Click.” (You can also do this from the
right click menu.) Once you have done this for each animation, your list
will look like this:
Add Text Boxes
You are now ready to add the text boxes which, when
clicked, will cause the pictures to appear. Add one box for each
picture, and add text to each that contains the name of the item in the
picture.) When you are done, arrange the boxes around the slide. Your
slide should look something like this:
In case you are wondering, the blue boxes with the
numbers in them match items in the animation list. They show which
animations are going to happen to which pictures.
Set up the triggers
We are now ready to change the entrance effect for
each picture to happen on a trigger instead of on a general mouse click.
To start the process, select the first pair of animations. Right click
on the first entrance animation and bring up the timing options. (Find
it by right clicking the animation and selecting “Timing”.) When the tab
is visible, click the “Triggers” button to show the options for your
trigger. The screen looks like this:
Change the radio button from “Animate as part of
click sequence” to “Start effect on click of:” Clicking the drop down
list will show a series of shape names. The first ones will be your
pictures, then will come your title. Then, finally will come a series of
rectangles named Rectangle #:Text, where # is the number of the
rectangle and “Text” is the text on the rectangle.
Select the drop down item that matches the picture
you have selected and click Okay. Notice that your animation has moved
to the bottom of your list and looks like this:
Move the animation entry for the picture’s exit
animation to just after the entrance animation. Your whole list should
now look like this:
Notice that you now have two animations that have
the number one and two more that are numbered two. Each time the
numbering starts over, you have started a new timeline, triggered by a
new event.
Now that your first trigger is set up use the same
steps to set up the triggers for the remaining pictures. When you are
done, your animation list will look like this:
When you have set up each trigger, the blue boxes
for the picture have changed from holding numbers to holding pointing
hands. This shows you that the picture is animated by the click of
another object instead of during the main time line.
Running the triggered slide
To activate each trigger, you must be showing (not
editing) the presentation. Start the show. Notice that all you see are
the master slide elements, the title and the boxes. Click a box and a
picture should appear. Click the box again and the picture will
disappear. Click off the box and your presentation will advance to the
next slide.
Notice a slight problem? If you followed my
directions exactly, all of the pictures come up behind the boxes on the
right side. To fix this, multi-select the six boxes and do a send to
back. Run the slide again and everything should be right.
If you are setting this up as a stand-alone
presentation, you will need to tell your viewers what to do to make the
pictures appear. Add a simple text box at the bottom of your slide that
reads “Click a box to see a picture” and you are all set.
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