PowerPoint For Dummies, Office 2021 Edition

Chapter 10

Animating Your Slides

IN THIS CHAPTER

Creating slide transitions

Animating text

If you plan to run your presentation on your computer’s screen or on a computer projector, you can use (or abuse) a bagful of exciting onscreen PowerPoint animations. Your audience members probably won’t be fooled into thinking that you hired Disney to create your slides, but they’ll be impressed all the same. Animations are just one more example of how PowerPoint can make even the dullest content look spectacular.

This chapter begins with slide transitions, which aren’t technically animations because they don’t involve moving individual items on a slide. However, slide transitions are usually used in concert with animations to create presentations that are as much fun to watch as they are informative.

Using the Transitions Tab

A transition is how PowerPoint gets from one slide to the next during an onscreen slideshow. The normal way to segue from slide to slide is simply cutting to the next slide — effective, yes, but also boring. PowerPoint enables you to assign any of the more than 50 different special effects to each slide transition. For example, you can have the next slide scoot over the top of the current slide from any direction, or you can have the current slide scoot off the ...