Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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You may have seen references in previous updates to Rick Altman's PowerPoint LIVE show, which I attend yearly and his latest book which I recently reviewed, "Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck".

When Rick and I recently spoke at InfoComm, I saw him use a technique which I had not seen previously, but which built on animation techniques we've covered here before.

As you may know, PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 have a Custom Animation Task Pane that enables four basic animation effects for selected objects: Entrance, Exit, Emphasis and Path.

What I had not known before was that if you use the Insert Object command another set of animation options become active: Object Animations.

As Rick described this — it opens up another world of interactivity beyond what normal PowerPoint users commonly know.

For one thing, as we'll soon see, it makes it less necessary to use a fancy portable mouse — any cheapo mouse that simply advances slides now enables full blown interactivity.

Here is a simple title and bullet slide with the bullets broken up by 1^st level paragraphs, and Custom Animation open to show the order of the bullets.

Figure 1330

There are a number of ways to launch other PowerPoint presentations from this slide; the easiest is to use an Action Setting.

I select a block of text to launch the hyperlinked presentation and right click and select Action Settings.

Figure 1331

In the Action Setting dialog box I can have the hyperlink go to another slide, another presentation (and determine which slide) or an entirely different file.

Figure 1332

For example, if I select an *.htm web page file, it will launch the page in Internet Explorer or my default browser. The resulting hyperlink is underlined in the slide and can be clicked during the slide show to launch the linked file, whether it is another presentation, custom show or other file.

Figure 1333

This is a nifty way to reuse other content during your presentation but it has one drawback — you need to be able to click the hyperlink. Many inexpensive portable mice just click to the next slide — you need to get one with full mouse functionality (and hope it works) to do a click.

The alternative is to use the Insert Object command.

Figure 1334

The default for this is to create a New Object from a selected program that you have loaded in Windows using OLE capability.

Figure 1335

But by clicking From File you get to Browse to any object or file that you want to insert into PowerPoint. Let's use another presentation.

The key point here is that after we Browse to select the file, we also click the Link option box, and select Display as Icon.

Figure 1336

Now comes the magic. With the icon in the PowerPoint slide, we can drag it outside the visible area.

And with the object selected, we can give it an Object Animation, which is now available —

Figure 1337

And notice the three choices, Show, Open and Edit.

For a PowerPoint file, we could use Show to present the linked file in full screen mode.

For training applications, we could open another application, or a specific file to Edit — and thereby demonstrate some technique or teach an entire lesson.

The really cool thing is that if we add that Object animation we can determine its order just like with the basic four animation effects — and in this particular example we can play that file right after the second bullet.

Figure 1338

The neat thing is that we don't need a mouse click function to launch a hyperlink — a simple click brings on the next "build" or bullet effect, which in this case is playing the file full screen, or opening a program or file to edit.

Of course if we were demonstrating, at this point we'd need full mouse functionality and we'd probably sit down to do the demo.

But to run another PowerPoint slide show we could just keep clicking through.

And remember, this functionality is not limited to PowerPoint; any Object that you can open and run from a file, or any program that you designate, can be placed in the Animation order of Custom Animation in this manner as an object.

For example, if you want to use the functionality of hide and show layers in Visio you could have the object be the file, Visio drawing or template, and have it open in the Animation order. When you're finished using Visio in this way, close the file and return to the presentation that launched it.

Since Custom Animation and Inserting Objects are also part of PowerPoint 2007, you can continue doing this in the latest version.

It's another example of using PowerPoint as a multimedia platform or as Rick Altman calls it, an operating system of its own.

The final point to keep in mind is that by using this scenario, you can just make your adjustments or edits to the linked files and be confident that when they are launched in PowerPoint that the latest version is what will launch.

The only caveat is to make sure you preserve your links by keeping the objects and files in the same relative location, or use the Update Links feature in PowerPoint and then check the links before presenting.

By doing this you can increase the functionality in PowerPoint almost exponentially.

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