How to Add Sound and Movement to PowerPoint Slides

Customize animation effects

Many presentations don’t require much in the way of animation, and you might find that transitions and ready-made animation effects will meet all your animation needs. However, for those occasions when you want a presentation with pizzazz, you can customize the animation effects.

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Animations can be useful for self-running presentations, where there is no presenter to lead the audience from one concept to another.

After you apply an animation effect, you can fine-tune its action in the following ways:

• Specify the direction, shape, or sequence of the animation. (The options vary depending on the type of animation you apply.)
• Specify what action will trigger the animation. For example, you can specify that clicking a different object on the slide will animate the selected object.
• As an alternative to clicking the mouse button to build animated slides, have PowerPoint build the slide for you.
• Control the implementation speed (duration) of each animation, or delay an animation effect.
• Change the order of the animation effects.

Entrance and exit effects cause objects to appear and disappear when you’re previewing or presenting a slide. However, all the objects are visible while you’re working in the Slide pane. A very helpful tool when managing multiple animated objects on a slide is the Animation Pane. Each numbered animation on the slide has a corresponding entry in the Animation Pane that provides information and options for managing the animations.

Manage all aspects of animations from the Animation Pane

The color coding of the Entrance, Emphasis, and Exit effects is visible in the Animation Pane, and a timeline is available at the bottom of the pane. The visual indicators to the right of each object name represent the type, starting point, and duration of each animation event, as follows:

• The indicator color represents the animation type (green for Entrance, yellow for Emphasis, blue for Motion Path, and red for Exit).
• The left side of the indicator aligns with the animation starting point. If the left sides of two indicators align, those animations start at the same time. If the left side of an indicator aligns with the right side of the previous indicator, the animations run in order.
• The width of the indicator is the animation duration as it relates to the timeline at the bottom of the Animation Pane.
• The right side of the indicator is either triangular or square. A square indicates that the animation has a fixed duration; a triangular edge indicates that the duration is set to Auto.

Each animation is an individual event. By default, each animation starts immediately “on click,” meaning when you switch to the slide, click the mouse button, tap the screen, or press an arrow key—any action that would otherwise move to the next slide. You can change the animation “trigger” either to run with or after another event, to run it after a certain length of time, or to run it when you click a specific screen element or reach a bookmark in an audio or video clip. You control these settings either from the Advanced Animation and Timing groups on the Animations tab, or from the Animation Pane.

Clicking an animation in the Animation Pane selects the animation and displays an arrow to the right of the animation timing indicators. Clicking the arrow displays a menu of actions. Some of these actions are available from the Animations tab, but the effect options available from this menu are more complex than those on the Effect Options menu in the Animation group.

You can configure these actions from the Animation Pane to customize an animation

Clicking Effect Options on the shortcut menu provides access to an effect-specific dialog box where you can refine that type of animation in the following ways:

• Specify whether the animation should be accompanied by a sound effect.
• Dim or hide the element after the animation, or have it change to a specific color.
• If the animation is applied to text, animate all the text at once or animate it word by word or letter by letter.
• Repeat an animation and specify what triggers its action.
• If a slide has more than one level of bullet points, animate different levels separately.
• If an object has text, animate the object and the text together (the default) or separately, or animate one but not the other.

The dialog box title is the animation type, and the options available in the dialog box are specific to that type of animation.

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Some of the settings available through the Animation Pane Effect Options menu

To open the effect-specific dialog box for an animation

1. Do either of the following in the Animation Pane:

   • Point to the animation, click the arrow, and then click Effect Options.
   • Double-click the animation.

To change the order of animation effects on a slide

1. On the slide or in the Animation Pane, select the animation you want to reorder.
2. On the Animations tab, in the Timing group, click Move Earlier or Move Later.

Or

1. In the Animation Pane, select the animation or animations that you want to move.
2. Drag the selection to the new position in the Animation Pane. The animation numbers change to reflect the new positions.

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After reordering animations, it’s a good idea to preview the animations to ensure that the actions happen in a logical order.

To set the trigger for a selected animation

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Many of the following settings can be configured on the Animations tab, in the Animation Pane, or in the effect-specific options dialog box. We’ve provided one path to the setting, but use the interface that you’re most comfortable with.

1. Do any of the following in the Timing group on the Animations tab:

   • To start the animation manually, click the Start list, and then click On Click.
   • To start the animation based on the previous animation, click the Start list, and then click With Previous or After Previous.
   • To start the animation a specific period of time after the trigger, specify the Delay in seconds.

Or

1. Do either of the following in the Advanced Animation group on the Animations tab:

   • To start the animation when you click an object on the slide, click the Trigger button, click On Click of, and then click a trigger object on the slide.
   • To start the animation at a specific point during the playback of an audio clip or video clip, in the Trigger list, click On Bookmark, and then click a bookmark that you’ve set in an audio or video clip.

See Also

For information about setting bookmarks, see the sidebar “Bookmark points of interest in media clips” later in this chapter.

Or

1. In the Animation Pane, drag the colored indicator bar to the starting point you want.

To set the duration of a selected animation

1. Do either of the following:

   • On the Animations tab, in the Timing group, specify the Duration in seconds.
   • In the Animation Pane, drag the right side of the colored indicator bar to set the duration in accordance with the timeline at the bottom of the pane.

To add a sound effect to an animation

1. In the Animation Pane, double-click the animation to open the animation-specific effect options dialog box.
2. On the Effect tab, click the Sound list, and then click the sound effect you want to assign to the animation.
3. Click the speaker icon to the right of the Sound list to display the volume slider, and set the volume level of the sound effect.
4. Click OK to close the dialog box.

Bookmark points of interest in media clips

Bookmarks are a useful new feature for PowerPoint users who incorporate audio, video, and animation into presentations. You can insert bookmarks into audio and video clips to identify locations either that you want to be able to quickly get to or that you want to use as triggers for other events.

For example, you could create an animation that visually describes a process, and record a narration that verbally describes the process. Instead of setting up a series of timing points to synchronize the narration and animation, you could insert bookmarks at key points in the narrative audio clip that trigger specific segments of the animation to play.

As another example, you could embed a video on a slide, and record audio comments about certain parts of the video. Then you can insert bookmarks at those points of the video to trigger the playback of the relevant audio comments.

When you insert bookmarks in audio and video clips within PowerPoint, those bookmarks exist only in PowerPoint and don’t affect the original recording.

To insert a bookmark in an audio or video clip, follow these steps:

1. Display the slide in Normal view and select the audio or video clip to display the Audio Tools or Video Tools tab group.
2. Play the clip by clicking the Play button on the playback toolbar or in the Preview group on the Playback tool tab.
3. At the point that you want to insert a bookmark, click the Add Bookmark button in the Bookmarks group on the Playback tool tab.
4. To insert additional bookmarks, repeat steps 2 and 3.

Bookmarks in audio or video clips are indicated by circles on the playback toolbar. Pointing to a bookmark on the toolbar displays a ScreenTip that includes the bookmark name. You can select a bookmark as the starting point for an animation, from the Trigger list on the Animations tab.

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Adding a bookmark to a media clip makes it available as a trigger

If you create a bookmark but then don’t need it, you can remove it by selecting it and then clicking the Remove Bookmark button in the Bookmarks group on the Playback tool tab.