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PowerPoint Animations: Starting Things Going
~~Kathryn Jacobs, PowerPointAnswers

(This article excerpted from the Eclectic Academy class PowerPoint Advanced: Animations. Learn more about the class here.)

Determining how to start animations in PPT 2002 and 2003 can be tricky. Starting them on click is straight forward: Click the slide and the animation sequence starts. Deciding when to use With Previous and After Previous is harder. Throw in the ability to add time delays to any of the start options and you can quickly get confused.

This article will explain the differences between the three methods and give you examples of when to use each of them and when to avoid each of them.

On Click, With Previous, After Previous

Let’s start by defining each of the three start types:

• On Click starts the animation sequence via a click any where on the slide

• With Previous starts the animation sequence at (virtually) the same time as the previous animation

• After Previous starts the animation sequence after the previous animation sequence has completed

But…
There is a catch. In addition to starting animations right away, each of the three options can be set up to have a built in delay of any number of seconds. To set up the delay, right click the animation, select timing tab, select number of seconds delay:

The default value for the delay is 0. In this instance, I have set up the animation in question to start 2 seconds after the slide is clicked. You can select the animation delay by using the up and down arrows or by typing in the number of seconds directly. As far as I can tell, any number from 0 on up will be taken. I’ve never tested anything over about two minutes, so I don’t know what the top really is.

This delay value is where the differences between the there animations really becomes obvious. We are going to look at each in turn

On Click with Delay

On Click with delay allows you to best control the start time when you use the delay option. Since the person running the presentation has to do something to start the sequence, the clock start time is known exactly. Click, the clock starts. X number of seconds later, the sequence starts.

With Previous with Delay

A delayed with previous starts the clock for the animation at the same time as the previous animation starts. Use this animation technique when you want to run multiple animations at the same time.

Because the delay starts when the previous animation starts, you can easily cause unexpected animation results. The problem becomes obvious when you have a slide with one object that has two motion path animations applied. The first animation should move the object diagonally across the slide. The second animation should move the object from a different spot to back to the start position.

Set the first animation to start on click and to run at a medium speed. Set the second to start with previous. Then, change the delay time for the second animation to be 2 seconds. I’ve set up an example for you. To see it, play this movie.

Did you see the problem? Because the first animation will not have finished before the second one starts, the object will move partially up the path, then jump to the start location for the second path.

While this can cause unexpected results with one object, when you use this technique with two objects, you get interesting effects.  For example, the results you see in this movie.

After Previous with Delay

After Previous starts the animation after the previous animation is done running. The clock for the delay doesn’t start until after the previous animation completes. This method is good for setting up sequential animations that you want to start by themselves. Adding the delay to the animation start leaves time without movement or change in between the two animations. See the results here.

Repeating animations

Along with the ability to decide how and when to start the animations, the timing options also allow you to decide if you want the animation to repeat. Animations set to repeat can be repeated a number of times, until the next mouse click, or until the end of the slide.

After Previous works fine, unless you set one of the animations to loop. Once an animation starts, it isn’t done until it is done repeating. Each animation is repeated as many times as you tell it. If you have multiple animations on a slide that are set to repeat one after the other, you can get yourself into trouble.

If you set an animation to repeat until the end of the slide, then the execution of the next animation is not consistent. Some Entrance animations don’t repeat, even though they say they will. Some repeat ad infinitum (as you would expect). Motion paths repeat 2-4 times before going on to the next one. To see this, play this video.

The strange pattern happens because each animation finishes its repeats before the next one starts. What if I have more than one object on the slide with repeat animations?

For this next example, all the animations on this slide are set to repeat until End of Slide. As you watch this video, notice which ones repeat, which ones repeat continuously, and which ones just get confused.

The Entrance animation for the right hand circle was Expand. It continued to occur through out the remainder of the effect. The Entrance animation for the left hand circle was Flash Once. It may have continued, but you couldn’t tell. The first two Motion paths for each circle repeated some number of times. The last Motion path for each repeated until you ended the slide. As you can see, the effect was very interesting, but not what you expected.

Want to see how it was all done?
If you want to see how the animations in the video were created, take a peek at this PowerPoint presentation.

Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote
Get PowerPoint answers at http://www.powerpointanswers.com

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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.