Office 2008 for Mac All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter IV.7. Applying Animation

In This Chapter

• Categorizing animations

• Adding animations to text

• Animating a chart

Have you ever been "PowerPointed to death?" Chances are good that you have. If you've ever sat through a presentation where every slide had 20 bullets of text, no subtle animations, and no smooth transitions, you can claim to be a victim. Likewise, if you've seen a presentation that had every mesmerizing transition and swooshing animation possible, making you dizzy, you, too, can claim to be a victim.

Both extremes are deadly to presenters. There's no reason to use presentation software to simply display text, especially if there are oodles of text for each slide. If text is all you have, do your audience a favor and consider distributing it as a Word document or PDF file. Your audience will conclude that you're reading to them if your slides are mostly just text. We've heard some people mention a 7-x-7 rule. Use no more than seven words in a bullet point, and use no more than seven bullet points on a slide. And then there's the 10-20-30 rule, which calls for 10 slides to be presented in 20 minutes with text that's at least 30 points in size. Both rules seem reasonable to us — and hopefully to you, as well.

PowerPoint's role is to help you present rich media content that complements the points you make while you give your presentation. Animations and transitions help your presentation flow, just like they do in movies and television programs. In this chapter, we explore ...