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 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.

Here you can see the steps of animation:

first heading with subheadings

next heading with subheading appears on click of mouse

another heading with subheadings on another mouse click

Follow these steps:

1.        Create the text in the text boxes. Although some of the text boxes will overlap or be on top of others, at first, separate them so you can easily select them.

2.        Select the first text box that you want to appear. Choose Slide Show> Custom Animation. (In PowerPoint 2007, choose Animations tab> Custom Animation.)

3.        Choose Add Effect> Entrance> Appear.

4.        Select the second text (the subheadings) to appear at that point, and repeat for that text. You can set its Start property to With Previous or After Previous, so you don’t have to click.

5.        Select the third text that you want to appear (the second heading), and repeat, this time using the On Click Start property.

6.        Again select the second text (the subheadings). Choose Add Effect> Exit> Disappear. Set the Start to With Previous, so it disappears when the second text appears.

7.        Select the subheadings for the second heading and animate to appear With Previous or After Previous.

8.        Select the third heading and set to appear On Click.

9.        Again select the subheadings for the second heading and set to disappear With Previous, so that they disappear when the third heading appears.

10.        Select the third heading’s subheadings and set to appear With Previous or After Previous.

11.        If you want the third set of subheadings to disappear after a while, add a Disappear animation and set it to After Previous with a timing of a few seconds.