PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Sometimes, you just have too much information to display on a slide, but you don't need all of it there at one time. An interesting use of the Hide on Next Mouse Click feature, one of the After Animation options, is to display text, hide it, and then display new text in the same location. You get to use the same "real estate" twice.

The easiest way to do this is to create separate text placeholders for each group of text. You place some text in a placeholder and animate it to appear on a mouse click, with the Hide on Next Mouse Click option for the after animation effects. Another text placeholder is right in the same location and is animated to appear second on a mouse click. Here's what happens:

1. The first text appears when you click the mouse.
2. When you click the mouse again, the first text disappears and the second text appears in its place.

You can also create a heading/subheading effect where the subheadings appear automatically after a set number of seconds, then on your mouse click, they disappear and a new heading appears where the subheadings were.

I've created a one-slide PowerPoint example. It only uses one effect unique to PowerPoint 2002, as far as I know, so  most of it should work in earlier versions. (The 2002 effect is to add two animations to the last grouping of text; the second animation makes it disappear after 3 seconds.)
Download it.

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