Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 16: advanced powerpoint 609

Hiding slides

There may be times when you want to hide a slide from view without actually delet-

ing it. The slide needs more work, for example, or it’s not appropriate for a certain

audience. There are a couple of ways to go about preventing a slide from showing up

in slide shows. First, you can select the slide you want to hide and then select Slide

Show→Hide Slide. You can also use the Slide Sorter view to hide slides by selecting

the slides you want to hide and then clicking the Hide Slide button in the Slide

Sorter toolbar. (If that toolbar isn’t visible, choose View→Toolbars→Slide Sorter.)

PowerPoint simply skips over hidden slides when you run the slide show.

To bring a hidden slide back into view, Control-click it in Slide Sorter view and

select Hide Slide to turn off the checkmark.

Multimedia Effects

PowerPoint puts at your disposal a Spielbergian selection of special effects. In addi-

tion to the transitions you insert between slides, the program lets you animate par-

ticular elements in an image. It also enables you to add a soundtrack or voice narra-

tion to your slide show—features that are especially useful if you want to save the

presentation as a stand-alone movie.

Adding Animations

One of the simplest ways to jazz up a PowerPoint presentation is to animate an

element in a slide—be it text, an image, or even a movie. Animated objects whisk

into view when triggered by an advance key, then dart away the next time you press

the same key. You can control the animated object’s path of motion and also choose

whether its action is accompanied by a sound effect.

Figure 16-7:

Using the Define Custom Show

dialog box, you can choose a

subset of slides from the currently

open slide show and reorder those

slides any way you want to create

a customized presentation.

Making a

Slide Show

610 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

As always, these effects do nothing to make up for lack of a meaningful message in

your presentation, and seem primarily designed for making glitzy demos of Power-

Point at trade shows; use them sparingly and with good taste.

Tip: You’ve been warned: Animations may not show up when you export your PowerPoint presentation

as a QuickTime movie (as described on page 614), especially if you’ve also created transitions between

slides.

Standard animations

To animate an object using one of PowerPoint’s ready-made special effects, first

select the object you want to animate—click inside a block of text or click an image,

for example.

Note: Not all standard animations work with all kinds of objects. Laser Text and Typewriter, for instance,

affect only text, not graphics. If a particular effect isn’t applicable to the object you’ve selected, that option

is grayed out on the Animations menu.

Then choose an animation style from the Slide Show→Animations submenu, which

offers fourteen different animations (plus an Off option to remove an animation).

A few examples:

• Fly In. The selected object shoots in from the left with a swish sound and comes

to rest at its rightful spot in the layout.

•Fly Out. The selected object pops off the slide and exits to the right with the same

swish.

• Fly In/Out. The selected object flies onto the slide from the left and lands in its

proper position, then, with another press of the advance key, rockets off to the

right. An audible swish accompanies both motions.

Bullet by Bullet

I’ve seen these really tall, smart, good-looking people do

presentations where their bullet lists don’t show up all at

once. Instead, each point whooshes onto the screen on

command. Can I do that too?

It’s easy to animate the arrival of your bullets. Choose Slide

Show→Animations→Custom, click the Effects tab, and

then select the text object (the one that contains your bul-

lets) in the box to the left. From the “Entry effect” pop-up

menu, choose an animation style (such as Fly In From Left,

by far the most popular choice among tall, smart, good-

looking people).

If you click OK, your bullet points will now fly in one at a

time, each time you click the mouse (or press an advance

key). If you click the Order and Timing tab, you can specify

instead that they appear a certain number of seconds apart.

And, if you click the Options tab, you can choose the bullet

level that you want to group together—something that will

make sense only if you’ve actually created bulleted lists

within bulleted lists.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION

Multimedia

Effects