PowerPoint.Advanced.Presentation.Techniques [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Applying Custom Animation

Preset animation is a useful method of creating an animation initially, but it isn't very flexible. Fortunately, however, you can take what you created through preset animation and use it as a starting point for custom animation. (You can also create new custom animation from scratch, if you prefer.)

Custom animation is pretty amazing in its feature set. You can control how and when each individual object enters and exits, and you can even make objects dance around and make noise while they are just sitting there on the slide.

To work with custom animation, display the Custom Animation task pane (choose Slide Show⇨Custom Animation). Any animation that you set up earlier with preset animation appears there on the list, ready for your fine-tuning.

Dissecting a Preset Animation Scheme

A good way to learn about custom animation is to play around with the settings from a preset, so do the following if you want to try it out:

Display a slide that has a title and at least two bullet points on it.

Apply the Bounce preset animation to it from the Animation Schemes task pane.

Switch to the Custom Animation task pane. The animations used in the Bounce scheme appear on the list there, as shown in Figure 13-7.

Figure 13-7: Here's one of the animation schemes when viewed in the Custom Animation task pane.

Here are some things to notice:

The selected animation's Start setting is With Previous. That means it will begin simultaneously with the previous animation event. Since it is the first one on the list, the previous animation event is the transition to this slide from the one before it.

The selected animation's speed is Medium. There are other choices available on the Speed drop-down list.

Notice the grayed-out Property drop-down list. Some animations have some special property you can set, and it appears in that space. For example, some entrance and exit effects specify a direction. The selected effect does not happen to have that.

Each animated item is numbered starting with 0. They will execute in numeric order. That means the title will appear before the bullets, as shown in Figure 13-7.

Each bullet is individually numbered, but only the first one appears on the task pane's list. However, if you click the down arrow below the first one, a list will expand to show each one individually, as shown in Figure 13-8. This is by design. If you apply a change to the first one while the others are collapsed, the change will apply to all of them; if you apply a change to the first one (or any of them) while the list is expanded, it will apply only to that individual bullet point.

The mouse icons next to the bulleted list items indicate that each bulleted list item will appear one-by-one each time you click the mouse button.

The Re-Order up and down arrows at the bottom can be used to change the order in which items are animated on the slide.

Although it's not obvious from the black-and-white photo in Figure 13-7, the star symbols next to each item are green, which indicates an entrance effect (green means "entrance" in PowerPoint). That's the most common kind but not the only kind, as I'll explain next.

Figure 13-8: Expanding the list of animations shows the animations for items 2 through 4 (the other bullets on the bulleted list in Figure 13-7).

Applying a Custom Animation Effect

There are four types of animation effects possible on a slide, and each has a different color icon as follows:

Entrance (green): The item appears on the slide separately from the slide itself. Either it does not appear right away, or it appears in some unusual way (like flying in), or both.

Emphasis (yellow): An item that is already on the slide moves or changes in some way. For example, perhaps it spins around, grows, or changes color.

Exit (red): The item disappears from the slide before the slide itself disappears, and (optionally) it does so in some animated way.

Motion paths (gray): The item moves on the slide according to a preset path you specify, like a toy train running on a track you have designed. Motion paths are covered later in the chapter.

Entrance and exit effects usually involve some type of motion. Emphasis effects can involve motion but not necessarily; there are also emphasis effects for changing color, changing font, growing/shrinking, and so on.

There are many effect choices in each category. Different effects may have different icons, but the colors always match up with the category.

To apply a custom animation effect, follow these steps:

Select the object to be animated in Normal view.

In the Custom Animation task pane, click Add Effect. A menu appears with the four types listed previously. Point to the one you want, and a submenu appears.

Choose a recently used effect from the submenu (see Figure 13-9), or choose More Effects to open a dialog box (see Figure 13-10).

If you opened the dialog box, make your selection. A preview of the effect appears behind the dialog box. Then, click OK to apply it.

After applying the effect, use the Start drop-down list at the top of the Custom Animation task pane to set its start event (On Click, With Previous, or After Previous).

If there is a property or setting in the middle drop-down list in the task pane, set it. For example, for an entrance or exit effect, there may be a Direction setting (Top, Bottom, and so on).

Open the Speed drop-down list in the task pane and select the speed at which the animation should occur (Very Fast, Fast, Medium, and so on).

Test the animation by clicking the Play button at the bottom of the task pane, or click the Slide Show button there to preview it full-screen. (If you do the latter, press Esc to return to Normal view afterwards.)

Figure 13-9: Choose a recently used effect from the menu, or choose More Effects.

Figure 13-10: The Add Effect dialog box (the exact name varies) shows the full list of available effects of the chosen type.

Applying Multiple Effects to the Same Object

An object can have many effects applied to it. It can have separate entrance and exit effects, for example, plus emphasis effects that execute at various times in relation to the other activities. Select the object and click Add Effect, just like you do normally.

Changing to a Different Effect

To change to a different animation effect, select the animation effect for that object in the Custom Animation pane and click the Change button. The same menus/dialog boxes appear as when you initially applied the effect (refer to Figures 13-9 and 13-10). Now you can make a different choice.

Removing an Animation Effect

You can remove the animation for one specific object or remove all animation from an entire slide. When an object is not animated, it simply appears when the slide itself appears with no delay. The net result is that unanimated objects display first on the slide, followed by objects that have entrance animation effects.

To remove the animation for a specific object, start in the Custom Animation task pane. If the object is part of a group, such as a bulleted list, expand or collapse the list depending on what you want. To remove an effect from an entire text box, collapse it first. To remove an effect from only a single paragraph, expand the list first. Then, select the animation effect in the task pane, and click the Remove button. The animation is removed, and any remaining animation effects on the slide are renumbered.

To remove all animation for the whole slide, go back to the Animation Schemes controls (select Slide Show⇨Animation Schemes), and choose No Animation in the task pane. This works even if you did not use an animation scheme to set up the animation initially.

Reordering Animation Effects

Animation effects occur in the order in which they are listed in the Custom Animation task pane. To reorder them, drag-and-drop them up or down on the list, or use the Re-Order up/down arrow buttons at the bottom of the task pane.

Text Animation Options

When animating multiple paragraphs in a single text box, extra animation options are available that enable you to specify in what order and with what grouping the items will animate.

One way to change the order in which a bulleted list was animated would be to expand the animation list in the Custom Animation task pane, and then drag-and-drop or use the Re-Order arrows to put them in a different order, as described in the preceding section. However, if you just want them reversed in order (for example, bottom-to-top), you might find it easier to set the special Reverse option for the animation instead.

You can also choose the grouping for the animation. For example, suppose you have three levels of bullets in the text box, and you want a different second-level bullet to appear each time you click the mouse. You can specify the second level as the animation grouping, and all third-level bullets will appear as a whole along with their associated second-level bullet.

To access the text options for an animation effect, do the following:

In the Custom Animation task pane, make sure that the list is collapsed so that a single item represents the entire text box. Then, right-click that animation effect on the list and choose Effect Options.

Click the Text Animation tab (see Figure 13-11).

Open the Group Text list and choose how you want the animation grouped. The default is By 1st level paragraphs.

(Optional) If you want the next bullet point to appear automatically without having to click again after each one, mark the Automatically after checkbox and enter a number of seconds of delay between them.

(Optional) Mark the In reverse order checkbox if you want the list built from the bottom up.

Click OK.

Figure 13-11: Control how the text within a single text box is animated.

Specifying When an Animation Begins

An animation's start can be triggered in any of these ways:

With Previous: The animation begins simultaneously with any previous animations on the slide. For example, you can set up two different objects to animate at the same time by setting the second of the two to With Previous. If there is no previous animation event on the slide, the animation will occur concurrently with the slide itself appearing.

After Previous: The animation begins immediately after the previous animation finishes on the slide. If there is no previous animation, it occurs immediately after the slide itself appears.

On Click: The animation occurs when the mouse is clicked. This is useful when you want to build a slide item-by-item with each click, or for an exit effect.

In addition to these three normal sequence triggers, you can also set up an effect to trigger only when you click something in particular. For example, suppose you have three bullet points on a list and three photos. You would like each bullet point to appear when you click its corresponding photo. To set that up, you animate each bullet point's entrance effect with the graphic object as its trigger.

To set when an animation starts, do the following:

In the Custom Animation task pane, right-click the effect and choose Timing. A dialog box for the effect appears with the Timing tab on top. We will look at the options on this tab in the next section of the chapter.

Click the Triggers button, expanding the dialog box controls to show additional controls at the bottom (see Figure 13-12).

Click Start Effect on Click Of, and then open the drop-down list and select an object. All objects on the current slide appear on this list. (You cannot set the start of an animation to depend on an object on a different slide.)

Click OK.

Figure 13-12: The Timing tab with the Triggers controls expanded.

Setting Custom Animation Timings

Each animation has timing settings that control the speed at which the animation occurs and the delay between the preceding event and the beginning of the animation. You can also specify whether an animation should repeat, and if so, how many times.

At the most basic level, you can set the timing from the Speed drop-down list in the Custom Animation task pane, as you saw earlier in the chapter. For most animations you can choose from Very Fast, Fast, Medium, Slow, and Very Slow.

For more control, you can work with the Timing tab (see Figure 13-12) by right-clicking the animation effect in the task pane and choosing Timing. From the Timing tab, you can set the following options:

Start: This is the same as the Start drop-down list in the task pane. See the preceding section.

Delay: The amount of pause between the event start from the Start setting and the execution of the animation. For example, if the animation effect is set for After Previous, the delay is the number of seconds between the end of the previous event and the beginning of the animation. If the Start setting is With Previous, the delay is the number of seconds between the beginning of the previous event and the beginning of the animation. Delay is set to 0 by default.

Speed: This is the same as the Speed drop-down list in the task pane.

Repeat: The number of times the animation should repeat. The default is None. You would rarely set an animation to repeat because it makes the slide harder for the audience to read. However, it can be useful when you want a graphic to flash until the end of the slide, for example.

Rewind when done playing: This setting applies mostly to video clips; it is available for animation effects, but you will not see much difference between on and off.

Triggers: Click this button to display extra controls that enable you to set an animation to occur when a particular object is clicked, as opposed to a click in general. See the preceding section.

You can also use the Advanced Timeline to sequence animations, just as you did with sounds in Chapter 12. To turn on the timeline, right-click any animation and choose Show Advanced Timeline. The timeline is useful because it can give you a feel for the total time involved in all the animations you have set up on a slide, including any delays you have built in (see Figure 13-13).

Figure 13-13: The Advanced Timeline shows the amount of time that your animations will take up.

Notice in Figure 13-13 that there are two pieces to each bullet point's timing bar-a colored part and a transparent part. The colored part represents the time required for the basic animation. For example, each of these is set to Medium speed for the animation, which takes 2 seconds, so each of the colored portions of the bars represents 2 seconds. The transparent portions of the bars are there because these bullet points happen to have been set up (in the Effect Options dialog box, on the Effect tab) to display the text "by letter," which takes longer than the base effect would normally take. The extra portion of the time bar represents that extra time is required. If I were to change the setting on the Effect tab to "All at Once," the timing bars would change here to be just the solid parts, and they would be much shorter.

You can use the timeline to create additional delays between animations and increase the durations of individual animations. To increase or decrease the duration of an item, drag the right side of the colored bar. To create a delay or an overlap between animations, drag the left side of the bar.

Dragging a bar for an item that is set to After Previous will move the other bars too to allow the timing for the entire sequence to change. When you drag a bar for an item set to With Previous, however, overlap is allowed.

Applying Sounds to Animation Effects

In Chapter 12 you learned about sounds and how to apply them to objects so that the sound would play when the object was clicked or pointed to.

There's a subtle distinction (but an important one) between that kind of sound assignment and the kind we're going to talk about in this chapter: assigning a sound to the animation effect associated with an object.

An example may make this clearer. Suppose you associate the sound of a telephone ringing to a piece of clip art on the slide, such that every time that clip is clicked, the telephone sound plays. This is not animation; this is just an "On Click" action setting.

On the other hand, suppose you want the telephone ringing sound to play automatically when the clip art appears on the slide, and you want the clip to appear when you click the mouse (anywhere). To do this you would animate the clip art with an entrance effect set to On Click as the Start setting and then set the effect options for the animation so that the sound was associated with the effect.

See the difference? When you assign a sound to an animation event that is triggered on mouse click, you click anywhere to trigger the event and the sound plays as part of that event. When you assign a sound to an On Click action setting for an object, the sound plays only when you click on that object.

Now that we've got that straightened out, here's how to associate a sound with an animation effect:

Right-click the effect in the Custom Animation task pane, and choose Effect Options.

On the Effect tab, open the Sound drop-down list and choose a sound, or choose Other Sound to pick from another location. (It's the same deal as in Chapter 12.) Or, to make the previously playing sound stop when this animation occurs, choose Stop Previous Sound.

Click OK.

Triggering an Event

There's more animation than the standard start methods. You can set up triggers that enable the click of one object to make the animation of another object begin. This is a very powerful feature! Here are some things you can do with it:

Toggle a video between playing and pausing by clicking buttons you create.

Drag a sound icon off the slide, and then trigger its play with a click to some other object on the slide.

Create user-interactive slides where different things happen based on what the user clicks. For example, a multiple-choice question might animate a certain text box to appear with a right answer.

To set up a trigger, create the custom animation for the object as normal, and then do the following in the Custom Animation task pane:

Open the drop-down menu for the item and choose Effect Options.

Click the Timing tab and then the Triggers button to display the trigger controls.

Open the Start effect on click of list and choose the object that should be clicked to start this animation (see Figure 13-14).

Click OK.

Figure 13-14: Create a trigger that makes one object animate when another is clicked.

Dimming or Hiding after Animation

What happens after an animation effect has finished? Usually nothing in particular. Other effects may execute, but the animated object just sits there after it has finished doing its thing.

However, if desired, you can set up one of the following to occur for an object after it has finished animating:

Change color: You can choose a scheme color or a fixed color. This is called dimming, because usually the color you would choose would be less contrasting to the background than the original, giving the appearance that the object had dimmed in brightness. (However, actually you are free to choose any color to change to, including a brighter one than the original.) As you might expect, this works best on text rather than graphics; a graphic usually becomes a shapeless mono-color blob if you apply a color change to it.

Hide: The object can disappear entirely from the slide, either after the animation or after the next mouse click.

To choose an after-animation effect, right-click the animation effect in the Custom Animation task pane and choose Effect Options. On the Effect tab, set the After Animation setting to the desired color or effect (see Figure 13-15).

Figure 13-15: Specify a color change or disappearance for an object after its animation.