Rather than just having the entire contents of each slide appear all at once, you can animate the slide title, the bulleted points, and any tables, charts, and graphics so that they are revealed sequentially as you discuss them. You can also specify the manner in which they appear (dissolve, drop in, etc.), and sound effects can be included as well.

In this lesson we will talk about the simplest way to introduce animation into your presentation: Preset Animations. PowerPoint has a pre-defined selection of popular animations that you can choose from. Many of these preset animations include sound as well as motion. With this technique, you can quickly animate the elements of a slide.

 

To quickly and easily animate an element (a title, text block, chart, table, or other graphic):

1) Click on the element you wish to have appear first on the slide.

2) Pull down the Slide Show menu and point to Preset Animation. Click the animation you want to use:

3) Go back to step 1 and repeat for each area on the screen you wish to animate. Keep in mind that the items will appear on the screen in the order you animate them.

Once you have completed assigning your animations, you can view the slide show to see how they look.

Please note: With preset animations you have limited ability to control the details of an animation. For example, preset animations treat a bullet and its sub-bullets as one element which will appear on the screen together. If you want finer control of your animations, see the Custom Animations lesson.