Animating Objects in MS PowerPoint

Animations in MS PowerPoint are the most interactive way to present the data to someone. Nowadays, animations keep people engaged with the concept which they are explaining using the help of PowerPoint. PowerPoint animations play a vital role to understand the most complicated topics very easily. PowerPoint is commonly used by people in business and also the students to create the presentation.

Features of MS PowerPoint

There are multiple features available in MS PowerPoint, Among all, we will discuss a few of them below;

Slide Layout

There are multiple options available according to the requirement, based on which presentations can be prepared. You can see the “Add Slide” option under the home tab itself.

Insert-audio, video, clipart

We can attach audio, videos, images, etc inside the PowerPoint presentation to make the presentation more interesting. You can see all of them under the Insert tab.

Slide-Design

MS PowerPoint has various themes using different types of textures and backgrounds as in-built. We can also create our own type of slide design and use it. You can see this option under the Design tab.

Animations

PowerPoint animations are used to create games or movies. But majorly it is used for the purpose of education and business sectors. You can see this option under the Animations tab. Now we will learn more about animations in MS Powerpoint.

Animations in PowerPoint

Animations are one of the most important features of MS PowerPoint from which we can make creative templates out of it. Now we see the various options present under the animations tab and discuss them one by one:

• Preview
• Type of animation
• Effect options
• Add Animation
• Animation Pane
• Trigger (available for new version)
• Animation Painter (available for new version)

Preview

Animation effects that you have applied will show when you play the slide show. You can preview the animations quickly for the current slide without clicking the option of the slideshow.

Steps to preview:

1. Navigate to the slide you want to preview.
2. From the Animations tab, click the Preview command. The animations for the current slide will play.

Type of Animation

There are so many in-built animation effects provided by MS PowerPoint, and they are categorized into four types:

• Entrance: It has animations telling that how an object should enter. For example, with the fly animation, the object will “fly” onto the slide from any of the 4 directions.
• Emphasis: This type of animation usually occurs by the mouse clicks i.e when the object is already on the slide. For example, we can make the object wave after the entrance animation has finished.
• Exit: These have a set of animations to control the exit animations. For example, in the Fade animation, the object will fade away.
• Motion Paths: They are similar to emphasis animation effects, but these animations are a little advanced as the object will move in a specified path. These paths can be edited also.

Steps to apply the animation:

Step 1: Select the object you want to animate.

Step 2: Go to the animation tab and click on the dropdown to view all types of animations.

Step 3: A drop-down menu of animation effects will appear. Select the desired effect.

Step 4: The effect will apply to the object. In the Slide pane, a star symbol appears next to the slide, by which we can confirm that animation is applied.

Effect Options

Some effects will have options you can change. For example, in the effect of the random bars, we can control that we need vertical or horizontal bars. We can use these options by accessing the Effect Options command in the Animation group. It totally depends on the animation which is selected.

Add Animation

If you want to add new animation then we can reselect in the animation group but to add new animation without changing the existing one we use this option. And sometimes to make the content interactive we need to add 2 or more effects. To apply these changes click on Add Animation command, this option will allow adding new animations without changing the old ones.

Steps to apply multiple animations to a single object:

Step 1: Select an object.

Step 2: Click the Animations tab.

Step 3: In the Advanced Animation group, we need to click the Add Animation command to view the available animations.

Step 4: Select the desired animation effect.

Step 5: If the object has multiple effects then for every effect it will show numbers according to the priority i.e numbers indicate the order in which the effects will occur.

Animation Pane

The Animation Pane option has the power to manage the timing of particular animations. You can easily modify the effects related to the animations like reordering the animations according to the preference and time interval.

Steps for Operating Animation pane:

Step 1: Open the Animations tab, on the right side click on the animation pane option.

Step 2: A separate dialogue box gets opened on the right side of the window. It shows all the effects for the current slide in which they will appear.

Step 3: We can also set the start time, delay time, and also we can set when to move to the next slide, for this, we have 3 options:

• Start on Click
• Start with Previous
• Start after Previous

Step 4: We can reorder animations with the help of two options which are a) Move Earlier b) Move Later

Note: We can also reorder the animations according to our requirement, for that we just need to click and drag.

Steps To open the Effect Options dialogue box:

Step 1: From the Animation Pane, select an effect and right-click on it.

Step 2: Click the drop-down arrow, then select Effect Options.

Step 3: The Effect Options dialogue box will appear. You can add extra enhancements to that particular effect:

• Sound: Adds a sound effect to the animation
• After animation: Changes the color or hides the object after the animation is over
• Animate text: This allows you to animate text all at once, one word at a time, or one letter at a time.

Step 4: In the timing tab, we can add the delay before it starts and change the duration of the effect, and control whether the effect repeats or not.

Trigger

A trigger is an object that you click to cause the animation to occur on a slide. Animation can be anything like motion, exist emphasis, or entrance motion path. You can click on any one object to trigger the animation of another object, but it is also possible to make the trigger object and the animated object the same. Generally, the animations happen in a preset order.

Steps to Apply trigger:

Step 1: Firstly select the object to which you want to add a trigger.

Step 2: Now click on the trigger option in the animations tab and select on click option.

Step 3: Now you can see a list of animations applied to that object.

Step 4: We can select what should happen if we click on that object i.e which animation should take place.

After we have applied the trigger we can confirm the changes by seeing an energy type symbol.

Animation Painter

It applies animation characteristics and effects equally to other objects with one click. Sometimes we need to apply the same animation to all the objects in PPT at that time animation painter is very useful.

Initially, in the whole slide, we have only two titles they are “Geeks For Geeks” and “Classes” and for both the titles we have applied 2 different animation effects which are “Fly-In” and “random bars” respectively. You can see the below images:

Steps to apply Animation Painter:

Step 1: Firstly select the object whose animation effect should be copied. (second title)

Step 2: Now click on the animation painter option.

Step 3: After that, we can observe the difference by previewing it.

Step 4: You will observe all objects in that slide are following the same type of animation. (first title animation effect will change)