Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In the course of my work I have had the opportunity to see two absolute masters of animation, Troy Chollar and Glen Millar. Audiences at PowerPoint LIVE applaud when these two PowerPoint MVPs are kind enough to deconstruct some of their sample presentations for mere mortals. I’ve learned a lot from them, and I’ll share with you a few of those lessons.

In this short sequence, I demonstrate how you can work with an image by placing it on the Background of a slide, and then hide and reveal the images (in essence, masking it) with a series of AutoShapes.

The first thing to do is to put our main image on the background of the slide with which we'll be working — not in the slide itself.

Click Format > Background, and select the Fill Effects from the drop down menu. As we did with the AutoShape, we now can click the Picture tab and add an image as the Background for the current slide.

Figure 842

The next items I add to the slide are two AutoShapes that look like they're the main message of the slide itself. I create a red rectangle, and an octagon that resembles a Stop sign.

Figure 843

Putting a Background Image into an AutoShape

But I want to create a more complex effect. On top of the rectangle and octagon, I place three fitted triangles: two right triangles, and an isosceles triangle in the middle. It may take a little twisting and rotating and resizing to get them to fit perfectly.

Figure 844

Then, for each triangle, we right-click it, select Format AutoShape, remove the Line or Border (No Line), and set the Fill Effect to Background.

Figure 845

Now the three triangles look like they're a single image in the slide.

We are set up; we can have a single click in Custom Animation trigger a series of Exit effects:

First, the triangles will collapse and disappear.
After a slight delay, the main message components – the rectangle and octagon — will make their exit, revealing the actual image on the Background.

Figure 846

A quick shot of the final sequence is projected full screen.

Figure 847

To the extent that you build a complex sequence of AutoShapes in this manner and have them leave the scene with a properly timed series of effects, you can leave an audience with a lasting memory of your message.

Getting Trigger-Happy

Triggers have a meaning of their own in PowerPoint animation, and they can be very handy.

Using a trigger means that not just any mouse click will launch a specific animation (or group of animations). Rather, similar to a web page hyperlink, a trigger is the result of a mouse click on another specific selectable object in the slide.

While we could make a visible area of the slide "clickable" as a trigger, in this section, we'll take it a step further and create an invisible button or hot area.

This technique is perfect for a simple interactive game or training exercise.

In this X-ray image, we can add the two Block Arrows, one designating an area called "Disease" and the next pointing to an area we'll simply call "Other."

In this situation, we want the correct arrow to make an Entrance only when the user clicks directly on the appropriate area of the screen.

To create the hot area of invisible button, we've simply used a rectangle and given it no Fill color and no Line color.

Figure 848

Now it's time to assign the Entrance commands and the Triggers.

First, as we've seen, we select the object (Disease Left Arrow) and give it an Entrance effect. With the Effect selected in the Custom Animation Task Pane, we click its down option arrow, and select Timing.

Figure 849

In the Timing tab, we select Triggers and click the radio button to Start effect on click of:

Then we need to find the trigger from among the objects in the drop down menu. These are all of the objects we've added to the slide, with numbers in the order in which they were created. Fortunately, in this scenario there are only two rectangles. We'll try Rectangle 7:

Figure 850

In a scenario like this we might want to distinguish one area from another, and keep coming back to them. In addition, we won't necessarily know in which order they will be clicked – that's what makes this interactive.

Therefore, for each entrance of one Block Arrow, we add an Exit for the other. In the Custom Animation Task Pane, the Entrance effects are designated with a Green Star, the Exits with a Red.

In addition, we don't want the two triggered object on the slide when it appears. So, at the top of the Custom Animation Task Pane we give each an Exit > Disappear command With Previous (the appearance of the slide itself).

Then we assign triggers to both the Entrance and Exit animations, and make them all With Previous.

When we're done, there are two triggered objects.

Figure 851

Now whenever the slide loads, the arrows are gone; you might say the new slide event triggers the first Exit effect of the two arrows. But as soon as one hot area has the mouse pointer go over it, the pointer turns into a hand, letting the user know it is "hot." Then, when it is clicked, the Entrance effect is triggered correct arrow appears and identifies it. Then if the other area is clicked, the wrong arrow disappears and the correct one Fades in.

Locating and Selecting Invisible Objects

Once you've created your invisible object it sometimes gets lost in the slide, or behind other objects. First, use the Draw > Order > Bring to Front command to make sure it's on top of all other objects (so that it can be a hot zone). To select it, you can select any object, and then hit TAB to toggle through all of the selected objects in the slide.

When you want to select the object as the Trigger, you have to know its "name" in the slide, as designated by PowerPoint. In the case of these objects, which are Rectangles, one is Rectangle 7 (the seventh object created) and the other is Rectangle 10.

Needless to say the more complex your trigger slide becomes, the more important it is to keep these names handy and noted.

Triggers make your slide a truly interactive composition, whether the presenter in front of a group is the user, or whether it is presented to a set of users, whether downloaded from a web page or even presented with a touch screen monitor in a kiosk.

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