PowerPoint articles

OneNote articles

Recommended Links, Newsgroups, and Newsletters

Get Help directly from Kathy

	Web www.onppt.com

Trigger Happy Animations in PowerPoint


This article reprinted with permission from All 'Bout Computers.

Need to make content appear, change or disappear out of order? Need to control the order that things appear while in front of your audience? Playing games? You need to play with PowerPoint's Triggers option for custom animations. Added with PowerPoint 2002, this option allows you to control animations via mouse clicks as well as along a time line. 

What can be triggered?

Any animation or effect can be triggered. This includes the activation of a sound or a movie as well as the appearance, disappearance, and change of any slide element.

Trigger example

For our example, we are going to create a slide with a series of photos that appear when text boxes are clicked. We know that some of the users know what the items are already, but we want to make sure they have a chance to see each item anyway.

When we click a box to reveal a picture, we want the picture to appear. We then want the picture to disappear when the next text box is clicked. The basic steps we are going to do are:

1. Add the pictures.
2. Animate each picture to appear on mouse click and disappear on the next mouse click.
3. Add the text boxes with the name of each pictured item.
4. Change the entrance animation for each picture to be triggered.

Add pictures

The first step is to add 6 pictures to the slide, using Insert => Pictures => From  File. Multi-select three of  the pictures and move them to the right side of the slide. Multi-select the other three and move them to the left. Once they are in the correct area of the slide, stack them one on top of each other. Once all the pictures were inserted, my slide looked like this:

 

Animate each picture

To animate the pictures, select all the pictures and bring up the custom animation pane (Right click, Custom Animation or Slide Show => Custom Animation). From the Add Effect Menu, do an Entrance =>Appear. This adds the "Appear" animation to all of the pictures. While the pictures are still selected, do Add Effect => Exit => Disappear. Your animation pane should look somewhat like this:



Notice that all of the entrance effects (the green stars) are set up to happen on the same mouse click and all of the exit animations (the red stars) also set for the same mouse click. What's more, all of the entrances will happen at once and all of the exits will happen at once. We don't want this, so we need to rearrange the animations so that the order is Entrance, Exit, Entrance, Exit, etc. To do this, click on the first exit animation and use the re-order buttons on the bottom of the Custom Animation pane to move it up the list until it is just under the matching entrance animation. (You can also click and drag the animation if you find that easier.) Repeat this for each exit animation and your list will now look like this:



We are getting there, but we still have a problem: The pairs need to enter and exit on consecutive mouse clicks, not all on the same mouse click. To  do this, click the third animation and change the "Start" drop down to "On Click." (You can also do this from the right click menu.) Once you have done this for each animation, your list will look like this:



Add Text Boxes

You are now ready to add the text boxes which, when clicked, will cause the pictures to appear. Add one box for each picture, and add text to each that contains the name of the item in the picture.) When you are done, arrange the boxes around the slide. Your slide should look something like this:



In case you are wondering, the blue boxes with the numbers in them match items in the animation list. They show which animations are going to happen to which pictures. 

Set up the triggers

We are now ready to change the entrance effect for each picture to happen on a trigger instead of on a general mouse click. To start the process, select the first pair of animations.  Right click on the first entrance animation and bring up the timing options. (Find it by right clicking the animation and selecting "Timing".) When the tab is visible, click the "Triggers" button to show the options for your trigger. The screen looks like this:



 

Change the radio button from "Animate as part of click sequence" to "Start effect on click of:"  Clicking the drop down list will show a series of shape names. The first ones will be your pictures, then will come your title. Then, finally will come a series of rectangles named Rectangle #:Text, where # is the number of the rectangle and "Text" is the text on the rectangle. 

Select the drop down item that matches the picture you have selected and click Okay. Notice that your animation has moved to the bottom of your list and looks like this:



Move the animation entry for the picture's exit animation to just after the entrance animation. Your whole list should now look like this:



Notice that you now have two animations that have the number one and two more that are numbered two. Each time the numbering starts over, you have started a new timeline, triggered by a new event. 

Now that your first trigger is set up use the same steps to set up the triggers for the remaining pictures. When you are done, your animation list will look like this:



 

When you have set up each trigger, the blue boxes for the picture have changed from holding numbers to holding pointing hands. This shows you that the picture is animated by the click of another object instead of during the main time line. 

Running the triggered slide

To activate each trigger, you must be showing (not editing) the presentation. Start the show. Notice that all you see are the master slide elements, the title and the boxes. Click a box and a picture should appear. Click the box again and the picture will disappear. Click off the box and your presentation will advance to the next slide. 

Notice a slight problem? If you followed my directions exactly, all of the pictures come up behind the boxes on the right side. To fix this, multi-select the six boxes and do a send to back. Run the slide again and everything should be right. 

If you are setting this up as a stand-alone presentation, you will need to tell your viewers what to do to make the pictures appear. Add a simple text box at the bottom of your slide that reads "Click a box to see a picture" and you are all set.