PowerPoint Tips Blog

Make an object disappear behind another object

You can make an object seem to disappear behind another object, or appear from behind that object. This effect creates a 3D impression and seems quite magical.

In order for this to work, you need to create the appearance of a 3D environment that your object can disappear behind. This takes some experimentation. [...]

Animate a table or chart in PowerPoint 2007 & 2010

You may want to animate individual elements of a table such as rows, columns, or cells. PowerPoint lets you animate the entire table, but not its elements. Likewise, you may want to animated individual portions of a chart.

Note: Charts have their own animation settings, which may work fine for you. If they [...]

Animate a bouncing ball

As the co-author of Flash For Dummies, I’m always looking for ways to do in PowerPoint the kind of animation that you can do in Flash. Flash has more sophisticated animation tools, but you can often create surprisingly good results in PowerPoint.

This animation was inspired by Nancy Duarte’s book, slide:ology. In Chapter 9, [...]

Emphasize a section of text or an image

Sometimes you want to discuss a small section of text, but first show it in the context of its entire paragraph. This is a great way to introduce quotes. For example, in this quote, you may want to discuss the phrase, “Our own brain, our own heart is our temple.” But it’s a [...]

Text animation techniques

A subscriber asked me to write up some text animation techniques, so here are two that you might like to use. These work best when the text plays center screen and your slide doesn’t contain too much else. You wouldn’t use these techniques a lot, or with too much text.

Fade in variations [...]

Animate Text on Top of Text

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 [...]

Display a quarter-size slide show view

Do you often switch back and forth between Normal and Slide Show views? I do. I want to see how that animation or slide transition will look and so I switch over to check. A better way is to display both views simultaneously. Yes, you can do that, by displaying Slide Show view [...]

Create a timer

To get your audience to settle down before you start or for breaks, you can create a timer slide that counts down the seconds or minutes before you begin. You can use this timer to time 60 seconds or 60 minutes (for lunch, perhaps). In fact, you can set it up for less or [...]

Inside secrets to making your visuals look professional

By Jim Endicott, Owner/Manager of Distinction Jim Endicott is owner/manager of Distinction, is a nationally recognized consultant, designer, speaker and author specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. Jim was a Jesse H. Neal award-winning columnist for PRESENTATIONS magazine and has also contributed presentations-related content in magazines like Business Week, Consulting and Selling [...]

Use timing, animation, or sound in a presentation with hyperlinks

The problem: If you create a timed presentation that automatically advanced after a certain number of seconds — usually done in a kiosk situation where viewers view the presentation on their own — and include hyperlinks to allow viewers to review the presentation, after they click a hyperlink to go backwards, the presentation [...]

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