Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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A few weeks ago, I did a training session for the L.A. County District Attorney's Office, where about 30 attendees wanted to learn how to make their cases more dramatically.

Graphs and charts didn't figure as prominently as pictures and video in presenting evidence. However, one question they asked got me to thinking about going beyond the limitations of animating the MS Graph program that is part of Office.

Lots of PowerPoint books, including my own (SAMS Teach Yourself PowerPoint 2003 in 24 Hours) cover the Custom Animation Task Pane and show you how to animate individual elements of a chart.

As we'll see, you can present MS Graph charts sequentially, showing first the coordinates, then the categories or data series, allowing the presenter to comment on each element as it appears.

But what if you want to call attention to specific elements?

Typically, you would create a Block Arrow or Callout and have that magically whiz in or appear to highlight the part of the chart that is important.

One district attorney in my session wanted something more subtle and interesting. He wanted one series (out of several) to grow or change, in some way, to call attention to itself.

I had a sense of how it could be done, but I needed to play with it offline. Now that I've figured it out, let's go through the steps together.

First, we take the generic Bar Chart that comes up when MS Graph opens. We use the Chart Type dialog box to change it to a Line Chart (Chart > Chart Type on the Main Menu, with the Chart element appearing when MS Graph is active).

Selecting each data series in turn, we right-click to format it and change its weight and color. To make the final look more dramatic, we choose a medium weight (not the highest).

Now it's time to animate the chart.

Exit MS Graph, and select the chart object in the slide. Right-click and select Custom Animation to open the Custom Animation Task Pane.

The first thing to do is give the chart an entrance effect as a whole unit.

With the chart selected, click Effect, choose Entrance, and select the Dissolve In effect for the chart. (You may have to dig down into the dialog box to locate Dissolve In, if you haven't used it before.)

This is the best effect for charts – many animation effects will not work with individual chart elements at all – you can't fly in the data series, for example.

So far, we have the entire chart dissolving in. But we want to do it by elements: the data series.

Click the drop-down menu for the Dissolve In effect and select Effect Options.

Now you can go into the Chart Animation tab, and select to have the elements dissolve in by data series.

If you play the slide, you can now discuss the chart coordinates without showing the data, and then introduce each series by itself.

But now comes the tricky part. If you click the drop down arrow under the Effect in Custom Animation, you can see the separate elements. You could even intersperse them with other animated items, such as a selected bullet or whizzing arrow.

But you can't individually reanimate the elements to highlight them. So what can you do?

The first thing is to use what I call "The Old Duplicate Slide Trick." I click Insert > Duplicate slide to get a second chart just like the first one.

In the second chart slide, I select the chart and click to remove its Dissolve In effect in the Custom Animation Task Pane.

Then I double-click to open new new "unanimated" chart in Microsoft Graph, and select the data series I want to highlight. I right-click to format that data series, and this time I give it the maximum weight, and for good measure, I increase the size and change the color and shadow color of its data markers.

To make the effect even more interesting, I go into Slide Sorter View and give the second slide a Fade Smoothly Transition Effect.

Now when I play the two slides, I can first comment on the data series as they enter in the first slide. When the last animation plays, my next mouse click transitions smoothly to the second slide, which the audience perceives as the same graph.

The data series I want to highlight is the only thing that's changed. It fades smoothly to the thicker more pronounced version, allowing me to call additional attention to it.

In this case, we've learned two (or hopefully more) cool PowerPoint techniques. First, how to animate complex objects and use the Effect Options dialog box to fine tune the animation (check Effect Options for diagrams and sounds to see how they can be tweaked). And second, how to use a second Duplicate slide to give the illusion of further refinement, and make it easier to reuse elements we have already created.

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