15. Going Beyond Slide-By-Slide
In This Chapter
- Using Animations
- Custom Animation Types
- Adding Transitions
- Creating Custom Shows
- Hyperlinks
- Set Off Actions During Your Presentation
- Presenting Tools
There is more to a presentation than just slides. We want you to be able to create a presentation that blows away the competition. Some PowerPoint books we’ve read have silly tips telling you not to put black text on a black background. We won’t treat you like you’re an idiot, and this chapter take you much further than that.
First, you will learn how to create presentation animations. Having a presentation full of text and static, unmoving objects is not the best way to “wow” your audience, and while many animations these days can make a presentation look hokey, it is possible to create impressive animations and transitions that give your presentation kick. If you think about the most beautiful presentation ever, there’s a good chance that it involved an animation of one object or another, in addition to some nice slide transitions.
Next, there are things you can do to improve your presentation before you even stand up in front of a crowd. It’s easy to step through each slide and go through the motions, but it’s even better if you can rehearse timings, save them, and use them during your actual presentation. Not only can you save rehearsed timings, but also you can actually use a microphone to practice a presentation and remember exactly what you said and when you changed slides so that you can just press Play and rewatch an entire presentation.
Using Animations
Animations come in two flavors:
- Preset, which are just point and click
- Custom, for the more adventurous presentation
Preset Animations
Let’s talk about the standard animations for objects, which are one size fits all and come prepackaged for you so that all you have to do is decide what you want them to do.
Take a look at the Animations tab shown in Figure 15.1. This tab contains both the animations that correspond to individual objects, which this section is about, and the transitions from one slide to the next.
Figure 15.1 The Animations tab contains animations that are applied to whole slides and also to individual objects.
If you have an object selected, the Animate drop-down becomes enabled (see Figure 15.2) and allows you to choose one of five options:
- No Animation
- Fade
- Wipe
- Fly In
- Custom Animation
Figure 15.2 Click the Animate drop-down to reveal a set of preset animations.
Keep in mind that the preset animations shown depend on what you have selected, so don’t be surprised if you see something different from this figure if you have selected multiple lines, bars, shapes, and so on.
By default, No Animation is selected and causes your object to do nothing when slideshow is run. Fade, Wipe, and Fly In perform various effects to your object, which are pretty self-explanatory. It gets interesting when you select the last choice, Custom Animation, which is the same as clicking the Custom Animation button below the drop-down in the Animations group (see Figure 15.3).
Figure 15.3 The Custom Animation button toggles the Custom Animation pane and does the same thing as selecting Custom Animation from the Animate drop-down.
Custom Animations
As of the Office XP release of PowerPoint, the ability to create custom animations has been included to help you think outside of the box. This is where the many PowerPoint experts claim their fame. Custom animations are very customizable and allow you to specify what you want the animation to look like, when it should occur, and what it should affect.
Exploring the Custom Animation Pane
Take a look at the Custom Animation pane that appears when the Custom Animation button is selected on the Animations tab’s Animations group:
- The top section allows you to add, change, and remove effects from the currently selected object.
- The middle area shows you what animations exist on the current slide. The order they appear in determines the order in which they will play during the slideshow.
- The bottom area allows you to play all the animations one by one to preview what they all look like. After Play is clicked, an Animation status bar appears next to each animation showing how far along the animation it currently is, while the slide itself will actually animate the object (see Figure 15.4). This is a great way to test what the animations will do rather than having to enter Slide Show mode every time.
Figure 15.4 After clicking the Play button, the Animation status bar next to each animation displays the current progress and is a nice way to see relative lengths of animations compared to one another.
- When Play is clicked, a timeline is shown at the bottom of the animation area that displays how long the animations occur for the whole slide, whereas the Animation status bar (which appears next to each Animation) shows the length for only one Animation.
Note
When Play is clicked, the Animation status bar and timeline are shown only while the animations are previewed and disappear if the preview is stopped.
Another way to view this timeline is via the Show Advanced Timeline, which is an option under any of the animations drop-downs (see Figure 15.5).
Figure 15.5 Selecting Show Advanced Timeline allows you to see how long each animation will take. The timeline shown will look like the one in Figure 15.4, except that it will not go away.
Note
One of the cooler things about the Custom Animation pane is its ability to be dragged to the top, bottom, left, or right of the application, and it will dock there, unlike many of the other panes in PowerPoint. This is helpful if you have very descriptive animations and want more space to be taken up on the tops and bottoms of your windows. In addition, when you view the advanced timeline, you can see more about it, such as how many seconds it will last. You can also zoom in and out of the timeline to focus on specific pieces of your animations.
Using the Selection Pane with Custom Animations
Remember when we mentioned the Selection pane in Chapter 7, “Working with Shapes,” and how it’s useful to rename objects for use later? Well here’s one of those times. Custom animations use the same name as the Selection pane to identify objects, so if you want to really know what object you’re animating—such as the BlueSquareWithFadeAnimation—go ahead and rename your object to something unique via the Selection pane. Here’s how:
1. Launch the Selection pane by going to the Editing group in the Home tab and choosing the Select drop-down and then the Selection Pane button (see Figure 15.6).
Figure 15.6 Open the Selection pane from the Home tab.
Note
At this point, you will have the task panes open side by side because task panes no longer stack on top of each other. If you want more screen space, you can close the Custom Animation pane if it makes things easier.
2. With the Selection pane open, select an object, click its name in the Shapes on this Slide list, and enter the name you want your object to have. The new name appears immediately in the Custom Animation task pane after changing it in the Selection pane. Also, at this point, you might want to close the Selection pane because you’re done with it and it might just get in your way.
Custom Animation Types
Custom Animation types can really make a presentation stand out. Let’s explore the main types of Custom Animations, go into Motion Paths, and also look at Triggers.
Using Entrance, Emphasis, Exit
These three types of custom animations are grouped together only because they are separate from Motion Paths and are very similar to each other. The following sections regarding adding animations, previewing animations, and customizing their options apply to all types of Custom Animations.
Adding an Animation
After you select something on your slide and click Add Effect in the Custom Animation pane, the top three options are similar (see Figure 15.7):
- Entrance—Specifies effects that change how the object first appears
- Emphasis—Changes the behavior of an object that has already appeared
- Exit—Removes the object from the slide in a certain fashion
Figure 15.7 Three of the custom animations are very similar: Entrance, Emphasis, and Exit. All affect a certain part of the timeline of an object’s animation. This is another case in which the list can look different depending on what type of animation is selected.
Go ahead and try this as an example. Click Add Effect from the Custom Animation pane and then select Entrance and then Blinds.
Note
These all have a More Effects option in the drop-down to reveal more custom animations. Be sure to check these out, as you might not have noticed how many there are.
Animation Options
Now that you have an existing effect, open the animation’s drop-down list by clicking the arrow on the right side of the animation in the list (see Figure 15.8).
Figure 15.8 The drop-down next to each animation effect lets you customize options specific to that animation.
Let’s look at some of the things you can do with a custom animation from the options in the drop-down.
The top section of the drop-down affects when the animation takes place. These variations determine when the animation starts:
- Start On Click—Starts the animation as soon as the mouse is clicked.
- Start With Previous—Causes animations to begin at the same time as the immediately previous animation. If it is the first animation, it starts automatically.
- Start After Previous—Waits for the immediately previous animation to finish, and then it begins. Again, if it is the first animation, it starts automatically.
The bottom portion of the list is specific to this effect. Choose from Effect options (seen in Figure 15.9); Timing options, which include a toggle for the Show Advanced Timeline (mentioned before); and Remove, which you can also do by clicking the button at the top-right of the Custom Animation pane.
Figure 15.9 Effect options dialog.
If you choose Effect options, the dialog box that contains options specific to the selected effect is displayed. (The Fly In effect was the chosen animation in Figure 15.9.) You see a tab for Effect, which includes some of the options that you can also change directly in the Custom Animation pane, such as the Direction setting. The Timing tab (see Figure 15.10) offers additional options for perfecting the timing of the animation. The Text Animation tab (see Figure 15.11) is specific to the animation being created in our example, as we had text selected when the Effect options command was chosen. This tab will not be present if text is not selected.
Figure 15.10 Timing options dialog.
Figure 15.11 Text Animations from the Effect options dialog. We discuss this in more detail later in this chapter.
Note
Clicking on Effect options and Timing brings up the same dialog but defaults to different tabs of the dialog.
Although we won’t go through every option under the Effect options because various effects have different options, we will advise you to explore all the options and all the different types of effects, as well as figure out what’s customizable and what exactly you want the animation to look like. It’s a good rule of thumb to imagine the animation you want and then try to create it.
Previewing One Animation
Clicking Play in the Custom Animation pane list with an animation selected shows you a preview of what it will look like during Slide Show mode. Also, if the AutoPreview box is checked at the bottom of the Custom Animation pane (see Figure 15.12), the animation will be previewed when it is added or changed.
Figure 15.12 AutoPreview will display what the Effect does when it is added to the object or modified.
Motion Paths
To add additional animations related to movement in the presentation, you will want to understand and use Motion Paths. A Motion Path allows you to specify a movement for the object, which you can then customize.
Creating a Motion Path
First things first: To create a Motion Path, select an object you want to move around on the slide during the presentation, and then click on Add Effect, Select Motion Path from the list to reveal the options.
You can
- Choose one of the preset line-like paths that are pretty generic (see Figure 15.13).
Figure 15.13 The preset Motion Paths you can choose from.
- Select Draw Custom Path, which lets you choose a tool to create the path yourself using freeforms (see Figure 15.14). This is especially handy for use with Tablet PCs. The recommended option is to use the Line, Curve and Motion Paths option, which gives you many more preset options.
Figure 15.14 Choose Draw Custom Path to create your own path and specify where you want your object to go.
Note
It can be hard to create freeform custom paths unless you have a very steady hand and perhaps a Tablet PC. The alternative is using curves and lines in addition to Edit Points.
- Choose More Motion Paths to select from 64 more paths, which actually appear as shapes and other interesting paths (see Figure 15.15).
Figure 15.15 The other Motion Paths are numerous and contain very cool paths, which would be difficult to re-create.
As with other animations, Motion Paths can be customized via the Effect options selection from the drop-down in the Custom Animation pane. From this dialog, you can lock the path, which can pin a path to a place on the slide background even if the object moves and also smooth the start or end. And, of course, choose the Timing tab and customize when this animation will occur, as well as any delays or events it needs to be aware of.
Editing Motion Paths and the Return of Edit Points
One really useful animation feature is after a Motion Path is created, it becomes editable so that you can change the rotation or drag the ends to make it larger or smaller.
You can be a real master of Motion Paths and use Edit points to adjust the path. Right-click the motion path and choose Edit Points to get started. If you aren’t familiar with using Edit points to work with freeform shapes, revisit Chapter 7 and learn how you can move points around, add points, change the line segment types, and basically create any type of path you can imagine.
Tip
You can also right-click a Motion Path and choose Reverse Path Direction if you originally drew the path backward. Similarly, if you use Autoreverse, an option on the Effect options dialog, you can create half of the animation and have it loop back to the origin.
Animating with Text
Remember when we showed you the Animate drop-down on the Animations tab in the Animations group? Well, it changes when you have text on your objects. If you have text that supports multiple paragraphs (Title Placeholders do not support this), the Animate drop-down is augmented to contain more options. Notice in Figure 15.16 that the same five options are available as in Figure 15.2, but now there are two options for each: All At Once and By 1st Level Paragraphs.
Figure 15.16 When text is available on your objects and supports paragraphs, the animation options expand to allow you to customize the animation on the text as All At Once or By 1st Level Paragraphs.
Note
These options also exist when animating SmartArt and Charts.
This is a great way to animate bulleted lists and nested lists. Try it out for yourself, and notice that it is a great way to group text together and also have a smooth animation apply to each group.
In addition to the standard animations, you can customize a Custom Animation for Text by clicking on Effect options from the Custom Animation drop-down and then selecting the Text Animation tab from that dialog. From here, you can change how “grouped text” (that is, several paragraphs) is animated, whether the shape that houses the text should be animated, and when the animation should start.
While playing around with custom animations, we found a pretty cool text effect you can create, which emphasizes your text and captures audiences’ attention. We’ve actually used this animation and received feedback from people, who couldn’t stop looking at it; it distracted people from the presentation. (So be careful when you use it.)
To get text that animates like Figure 15.17, do the following:
Note
The images don’t do this animation justice; you need to try it for yourself!
1. Create a new presentation (Ctrl+N), type some text into the title placeholder, and select the placeholder.
2. Launch the Custom Animation pane by choosing the Animations tab, and then in the Animations group, choose Custom Animation.
3. Click on Add Effect, Emphasis, Grow/Shrink.
4. Right-click the new animation that appears in the Custom Animations list to make the drop-down visible. Or click on the drop-down arrow to the animation’s right.
5. Select Effect options.
6. Make the Size larger than 150%. (We chose “Larger.”)
Note
To do this faster, there’s already a drop-down in the Custom Animations pane labeled Size, where you can change the size.
7. Check all three check boxes: Smooth Start, Smooth End, and Auto Reverse.
8. Choose to Animate Text: By Letter.
9. Select a 9% Delay between letters.
10. Under the Timing tab, choose Speed: 0.5 Seconds (Very Fast).
11. Set Repeat: Until End of Slide.
12. Click OK to save everything.
13. Click the Play button at the bottom of the Custom Animation pane to preview your creation (see Figure 15.17). This is the quick way to preview the animation, but it does not account for delays, so definitely test your animations with timing and clicks, with prev, after prev, and so on, in Slide Show mode.
Figure 15.17 Sample text animation.
As usual, you should play around with the settings and tweak it how you want it, but this is a start.
Triggers
Now that you’re an expert in the use of custom animations, let’s take it a step further and give you the power to start animations when an object is “triggered,” which means clicked on in this case. We are about to show you how to start an animation when another object on your slide is clicked.
To set a trigger, right-click an animation in the Custom Animation pane and choose Timing. Click on the Triggers drop-down, which has an interesting double arrow symbol (see Figure 15.18).
Figure 15.18 The Triggers button from the Timing drop-down from a Custom Animation drop-down on the Custom Animation pane.
Note that, by default, the Animate As Part of Click Sequence is selected, and after the other Start Effect On Click Of option is selected, the topmost drop-down on the Custom Animation pane will be set to On Click because what we are about to do requires clicking.
To specify which object needs to be clicked in order to start the Custom Animation, click on the drop-down and select an object based on its name. Remember, this is the same name you set via the Selection pane earlier this chapter.
Adding Transitions
Can you remember the last great presentation you saw that did not include any transitions between slides? Transitions are used in order to make a presentation run smoother and mitigate the sudden change between one slide and the next. Although it might seem as though transitions should be operations that occur between slides, to create one you must choose a slide and apply a transition that will occur before this slide is viewed in Slide Show mode. Think of transitions as entry transitions for the background, Master Slide elements, and any element without animation.
Note
Every slide starts with No Transition applied. This might seem boring, but many presentations work well without transitions when slides have content that flows smoothly from one slide to another.
To find the transitions and apply one, do the following:
1. Select the Animations tab.
2. Go to the large Transition to This Slide group.
3. From the gallery, hover your mouse over a transition to see a live preview, and click on one to apply it (see Figure 15.19).
Figure 15.19 Hover your mouse over a slide transition on the Animations tab and watch it preview on the main slide.
Note
Although this is just an example of a particular transition, many professionals think this dissolve transition is ugly, outdated, and should be avoided. For the purposes of this book, it translates best into print so that you can “see” the transition.
Drop down the gallery to expand it. This will show more transitions organized into the following types:
- No Transition
- Fades and Dissolves
- Wipes
- Push and Cover
- Stripes and Bars
- Random
How you use these depends on your content; definitely try them out and see what fits best with your presentation.
Transition Sounds
If you look to the right of the Transitions gallery on the Animations tab, you will find more options to customize your transition, such as the ability to add a sound that will play once or loop until the next sound if you check the box at the bottom of its drop-down, as shown in Figure 15.20.
Figure 15.20 The Transition Sound drop-down. A sound plays once unless you select the last option in the dialog to have the sound loop until the next sound.
By default, the sound is set to No Sound, which we recommend as well because most sounds end up sounding pretty tacky. However, feel free to prove us wrong by using your own sound, which you can do by selecting Other Sound from the drop-down.
Note
Live Preview works here as well, in that hovering over a sound will preview it. However, these get annoying pretty fast.
Transition Speed
The Transition Speed drop-down is right underneath the Transition Sound button. The transition speed is handy if you need to use up more time. By default, the speed is set to Fast, and the drop-down allows you to set it to Medium and Slow. These are the only options for the speed of the transition, and they vary from one transition to another.
Advancing to the Next Slide
For those who fear accidental clicks or want to really make sure that your Custom Animation trigger works perfectly, make sure to use the On Mouse Click feature and make sure that it is unchecked (see Figure 15.21). Because triggers start a custom animation when an object is clicked, this check box prevents any missed clicks from advancing the slide.
Figure 15.21 Uncheck the On Mouse Click box to prevent the mouse from advancing to the next slide.
To automatically advance to the next slide after a period of time, check the Automatically After box and set an amount of time into the timer on the right. If this is set to 00:00, the slide will advance automatically after all animations in the timeline finish.
Creating Custom Shows
This is one of our favorite features that is not widely known. Custom Show allows you to take slides from your presentation and build a new show with them. This is really powerful when you want to rearrange the slides for the presentation only but leave the slides in the same order in the physical presentation file. In addition, this allows you to repeat a slide as many times as you want, rather than duplicating the slides in the document.
To access Custom Show, first create many slides in a presentation and then do the following:
1. Click on the Slide Show tab.
2. Under the Start Slide Show group, click Custom Shows to reveal a drop-down.
3. Here you can either click on an existing Custom Show you have created in order to launch it or create a new one.
To create a new Custom Show:
1. Select Custom Shows from the Custom Shows drop-down (Slide Show tab, Start Slide Show group).
2. From this dialog, click on the New button.
3. Now give this Custom Show a Name.
4. Select Slides from the presentation on the left pane and click Add to put them into your custom show. If a slide does not have a title, only the slide number is shown.
5. Repeat until you have created a custom show to your liking. Also, repeat all the steps to create multiple custom shows.
At this point, you can reorder slides and add multiple slides at the same time. Also, custom shows only exist within one presentation and cannot be linked to from outside.
Now under the Custom Shows drop-down, you will find your new show, which you can launch by clicking on it. This list is ordered by the order in which you created the shows.
This is a great way to display different slides to diverse audiences if you plan on showing your presentation to a varied set of people.
Use this feature in combination with Action Settings or Hyperlinks, which we explain in the next section, to create a really cool hidden feature using hidden links to custom shows.
Hyperlinks
By now, everyone’s familiar with links on Internet web pages. PowerPoint supports links as well. You can put one on just about any shape or text:
1. To insert a shape, go to the Home tab, and in the Drawing group on the Shapes drop-down, select a shape and click on the slide to insert it. (We could just as easily type some text and select it, but for this example, we will use a shape.)
2. On the Insert tab in the Links group, choose Hyperlink (or just press Ctrl+K). In the dialog that comes up (see Figure 15.22), type in a web address such as http://www.ironjeff.com, and click OK.
Figure 15.22 Hyperlink dialog.
Tip
Alternatively, you can select text, right-click the selection, and choose Hyperlink. If the text you selected is spelled incorrectly though, you will see a spelling correction menu instead, and you will need to fix the spelling of the selected words before you can use this method to apply a hyperlink.
3. Click the shape. Uh, nothing happened. In Excel, that would launch the web site. In PowerPoint, hyperlinks are only active in Slide Show.
4. Go to the Start Slide Show group on the Slide Show tab and choose From Beginning. Or, just press F5.
5. Now that you’re in Slide Show mode, click the shape to activate the hyperlink. Note that when you hover your mouse over the shape, the cursor changes to a hand to show that it’s clickable.
Note
Hyperlinks cannot be placed on placeholders. If you apply a hyperlink on a placeholder, the hyperlink applies to all the text inside the placeholder. Microsoft probably figured that there was no need for hyperlinks on placeholders because most placeholders contain just text and don’t have anything you can really click on.
Set Off Actions During Your Presentation
Now that we’ve explored basic hyperlinks, let’s say that we want PowerPoint to link to something more interesting, such as to the next slide in the presentation. That’s where Actions come into play.
Inserting Action Buttons
The easiest way to create an Action link is to insert an Action button:
1. Go to the Home tab’s Drawing group and choose Shapes. Choose one of the Action buttons in the bottom category of the Shapes gallery (see Figure 15.23).
Figure 15.23 The choices at the bottom of the shapes gallery are Action buttons.
2. After you insert the Action button, the Action Settings dialog comes up (see Figure 15.24). You can click OK to just accept the default choice. We discuss each of the choices in greater depth in the “Different Types of Actions” section later in this chapter. If you ever change your mind about what Action to use, select the Action button, go to the Insert tab in the Links group, and choose Action.
Figure 15.24 Action Settings dialog.
3. Enter Slide Show mode by going to the Slide Show tab’s Start Slide Show group and choosing From Current Slide.
4. Click on the button you inserted to see what happens.
Depending on which Action button is chosen, nothing might happen when you click on it in Slide Show. For example, if you click the Home Action button (the one that looks like a house), this takes you to the first slide. Clicking it on the first slide will make it look as if nothing happened. Try a few different buttons to experiment.
Repeat for all the different Action Button types to see what they all do. Also, by default the Action buttons aren’t all that beautiful. Use the shape formatting skills you learned in Chapter 12, “Formatting Shapes, Text, and More” to spruce them up.
Before accepting the Action Settings dialog, take a quick look at the bottom of the dialog. Here you can choose to
- Play a sound when the link click occurs. This only works with
.wavfiles. - Highlight the button when the link click occurs. Note that this has no effect on Action buttons, which will always be highlighted when clicked.
These two actions will happen on the side in addition to anything else you’ve specified. Don’t overdo either, or you risk annoying your audience.
Mouse Over
If you look carefully at the Action Settings dialog, you will note that there are tabs at the top—one for Mouse Click and one for Mouse Over (see Figure 15.25). The options on both tabs are virtually identical, except that the choices on the second tab occur when you mouse over the button rather than click on it.
Figure 15.25 The action can appear when you click or when you mouse over.
What Is a Mouse Over?
A mouse over occurs when the mouse is hovered over a shape or text during the slideshow. You can jump to the next slide when someone moves the mouse over your button, for instance.
For a mouse over to work when the cursor is already on a shape, the cursor must leave the shape and then return back over the shape. This is a good reason not to set mouse over effects over large shapes that cover the entire slide.
Different Types of Actions
Let’s describe all the different types of actions to which you can link using the Action Settings dialog (seen previously in Figure 15.24):
- None—What’s the point of an Action button that does no action? You might want something to happen on Mouse Over but not on Mouse Click, or vice versa, so you’d choose None for the one you want to do nothing. You might also set an action to None if all you want to do is trigger one of the Side Actions described in the previous section, but you don’t want the link to actually go anywhere.
- Hyperlink to
- Next Slide—Fairly self-explanatory. For custom shows, mentioned earlier in this chapter, this does not jump to the next slide in the sequence but to the next slide in the original slide order. Also, this does not skip hidden slides, which we talk about at the end of this chapter. These two caveats apply to the next three items as well.
- Previous Slide
- First Slide
- Last Slide
- Last Slide Viewed—This is usually equivalent to Previous Slide, but if you used another action to link to the current slide, the Last Slide Viewed could be a totally different slide. For example, let’s say that someone going through your slideshow follows a hyperlink from slide 3 to slide 20. Clicking a Previous Slide link on slide 20 would go back to slide 19. Clicking a Last Slide Viewed link on slide 20 would go back to slide 3.
- End Show—In a regular slideshow, this ends the current slideshow. For a custom show, it just ends the custom show and returns to the slide that started the custom show. For external slideshows, it closes the external show and returns back to the slide that started the external show.
- Custom Show—We discussed custom shows previously in this chapter. Here you can link to one of them. You also get the option to select a check box labeled Show and Return. If you check this, when the linked custom show finishes playing, PowerPoint continues the slideshow on the slide containing the link. If it’s unchecked, after the custom show finishes, the entire slideshow finishes.
- Slide—Links to any slide in the presentation.
- URL—Similar to a normal hyperlink, such as one that links to http://www.waynekao.com.
- Other PowerPoint Presentation—You choose another presentation, and it shows that presentation before returning to the current slide.
Caution
Be careful if when linking to files on your disk with the Other PowerPoint Presentation or Other File choices. If you send your presentation to someone else using another computer, those links won’t work anymore unless the recipient has the same files sitting on the same places on his hard disk. To avoid headaches like this, we recommend only linking to files in the same folder as your presentation. It makes it less likely that you will forget to send the files when you email the presentation, plus PowerPoint is less likely to be confused where to find the files. And always test your links before making your big presentation.
- Other File—You can link to an Excel spreadsheet, a text file, or just about any document.
- Run Program—Choose a program to run. You can run Solitaire, Microsoft Word, World of Warcraft, or just about any other program you have. For those technical folk out there, note that you can have PowerPoint pass command-line switches when launching a program. Because this links to the actual program path on the current computer, make sure to test these links if you move the presentation from one computer to another. Also, note that during the slideshow, PowerPoint shows a scary warning message about external content before it actually runs the linked program.
- Run Macro—Here you can run your favorite macro. Read more about macros at the end of Chapter 10, “Formatting Your Presentation.”
- Object Action—Only applicable if you’re putting an action on an OLE object, which you can read about in Chapter 7. So, if you’ve embedded an Office document—such as an Excel spreadsheet—or you’ve embedded a sound or video, you can select the object, launch the Actions dialog, and the Object Action option will have some useful commands such as Edit and Open for the spreadsheet and Play for the sound or video.
Tip
Always test your hyperlinks and Action buttons. It’s very easy to get unexpected behavior, and you don’t want to be surprised halfway through an important presentation.
Nothing Special About These Buttons
It’s not just Action buttons that can use Actions and Action Settings. You can select any shape, text, or even a chart or SmartArt, and then go to the Insert tab, Links group and choose Action to apply the same actions.
Note
In PowerPoint 2003, you could right-click a shape or text and select Action Settings directly from the context menu. This functionality no longer exists in PowerPoint 2007.
Action Settings or Hyperlinks?
There is some functionality overlap between the Hyperlink dialog (found by going to the Insert tab, Links group and clicking Hyperlink) described in the previous section and the Actions dialog (also in the Links group, under Action). For instance, both let you link to a particular slide. There are two dialogs because the hyperlink dialog is the generic Microsoft Office dialog, very similar to the one used in Word and Excel, whereas the Actions dialog is specific to PowerPoint and showcases functionality only found in PowerPoint. In general, unless we’re creating a quick link to a website, we prefer to use the Actions dialog because it contains all the functionality of the hyperlink dialog, plus more.
There’s actually one special behavior you get with Action buttons that isn’t equivalent to adding an Action to other objects. When in Slide Show, if you click on an Action button, the button changes slightly to show its being pressed. You can duplicate this behavior by adding an animation to your object, but it won’t come automatically as it does with Action buttons.
Cool Things You Can Do with Actions
That’s enough nitty-gritty. Let’s talk about some neat uses of PowerPoint Actions.
Link to First Slide
It’s always nice having a link to the title slide of the presentation, no matter what slide you’re currently on. Let’s add one to the master:
1. On the View tab, go to the Presentation Views group and choose Slide Master to enter Slide Master view.
2. On the Home tab, go to the Drawing group and choose Shapes, and then select the Home Action button. That’s the one with the house on it (see Figure 15.26). Click on the slide to insert it.
Figure 15.26 Insert the Home Action button.
Caution
Make sure that a master is selected in the left pane, not a layout. Masters are the top-level slides with a number to the left of them; layouts are the ones that appear underneath them slightly indented. If you add to a layout on accident, the link will only appear on some slides. If you are really diligent, instead of adding the link to the master, you can just add it on several slide layouts where it makes sense and omit the link on layouts on which it doesn’t make sense, such as the Title Slide Layout.
3. By default, the Action Settings dialog indicates that the Action button will link to the First Slide. That’s what we want, so just click OK.
Note
Even if you click Cancel in the dialog, the Action button and the link are still inserted. The dialog just comes up, so you can change the link if you prefer.
That’s it. If you enter Slide Show mode, every slide now has a link to the first slide in the presentation.
Create Interactive Prototypes
Before companies spend a lot of time and energy building a software program such as Microsoft Office, they usually build a prototype and test it on people to see if they like it. PowerPoint makes it very easy to build a quick prototype of your idea.
Let’s say that we’re building a special check box library for a client and we want to test it to see how it will behave. That’s easy enough to do:
1. Create a new presentation.
2. On the first slide, add a picture of an unchecked check box. Or, be lame like us, and insert a donut shape from the Home tab’s Drawing group under Shapes.
3. Insert a new slide (on the Home tab in the Slides group, choose New Slide).
4. Now go to slide 2 and insert a picture of a checked check box. Or, we’re going to be lazy and insert a No symbol. Put it on the slide in exactly the same place you put the unchecked check box in step 2 (see Figure 15.27).
Figure 15.27 Insert two symbols in the same place on two different slides.
In this simple example, it’s probably easier to use triggered animations in which clicking one shape triggers the appearance of the other shape. Triggers are explained earlier in this chapter. Using triggers gives you the flexibility to have multiple controls without having to create a large number of slides. For more complicated prototypes with more than a simple shape, however, using the technique described here is often useful.
5. Now let’s make this interactive. On slide 1, select the unchecked check box and choose the Insert tab and then Action in the Links group. Click Hyperlink To and choose Next Slide from the drop-down.
6. On slide 2, we’re going to do something very similar. Select the checked check box and choose the Insert tab and then Action from the Links group. Click Hyperlink To and choose Previous Slide from the drop-down.
7. Now, enter Slide Show mode (press F5). When you click the button, watch how it checks itself. If you click it again, it will uncheck itself.
Note
If clicking a shape triggers both an animation and a hyperlink (or action), the hyperlink will happen first.
Hidden Link Depending on Audience Reaction
Adjust your presentation based on how your audience reacts. Let’s say that after you present the first slide of your presentation, you’re not sure whether your audience will want to dive into details or whether they will want a higher level overview. PowerPoint is perfect for this:
1. Create a new presentation with three slides. Number them 1–3 in their title placeholders so that you can tell them apart later.
2. Let’s pretend that slide 2 contains details and slide 3 has the high-level overview. On slide 1, let’s create some hidden links to slides 2 and 3.
3. Insert a shape on slide 1.
4. Get rid of the outline by going to the Shapes Styles group on the Format tab, clicking Shape Outline, and then clicking No Outline.
5. Set the fill to be barely visible. Back on the Format ribbon, click Shape Fill, choose More Fill Colors, and set the transparency at the bottom of the dialog to 99% (see Figure 15.28).
Figure 15.28 Set a high transparency fill.
Note
In PowerPoint 2007, hyperlinks on shapes do nothing in Slide Show unless the shape has a fill or a line. This is also the behavior in the PowerPoint Viewer. This differs from PowerPoint 2003 behavior. To work around this problem, set a nearly invisible fill or line on the shape, as we did in this section’s example.
6. Now insert an Action Setting. Go to the Insert tab in the Links group and click Action. Choose Hyperlink To so that this one links to the details slide, which is slide 2. Click OK.
7. Now duplicate your invisible shape by pressing Ctrl+D. Move the new shape so that it’s not so close to your original shape.
8. Let’s change this one’s link to the high-level overview on slide 3. Add an action by going to the Insert tab’s Links group and choosing Action yet again. Choose Hyperlink To. Then, choose Slide from the drop-down. Select slide 3 in the list of choices (see Figure 15.29).
Figure 15.29 Choose Hyperlink To and then choose Slide from the Action Settings dialog.
9. Now, if you go into Slide Show (press F5), you can present a spiel for the first slide, ask for questions, and then based on the answers, click on the link to the details page or the overview page.
Tip
A similar technique can be accomplished using Slide Show shortcut keys, detailed in Chapter 16. For example, you could press 3, and then press Enter to jump to slide 3. There’s less setup work, but the downside is that you will have to remember the slide number. Another way to accomplish this is to create custom shows of several topics that the audience might be interested in and then create menu slides that use Actions to link to each of them.
Presenting Tools
Although we claim that we cannot help you become great speakers, we can help you become great presenters. Or, we can at least show you some tools to help with your presentations.
Rehearse Timings
The old saying “practice makes perfect” might or might not work for you when giving presentations. Some people like to have every word memorized; some like to have just the general idea of what they will say and use talking points. Whatever style you use, it’s important to practice.
Rehearse Timings guides you through a dry run of your presentation by walking through it and recording how long you should spend on each slide. When you’re done recording, you can keep the timings of when to switch slides. Later, you can even use them during an actual presentation if you so desire.
To access Rehearse Timings, go to the Slide Show tab in the Set Up group and choose Rehearse Timings button. This will launch Slide Show for you with an added little widget to show you how much time has elapsed (see Figure 15.30). This widget is nice because it gives you a Next button to switch to the next slide, a Pause button to take a break from the timing, the current time that has been spent on the current slide, a Repeat button to restart timing on this slide, and the total time that has been recorded in the presentation as a whole.
Figure 15.30 The Slide Show Widget gives you information about your rehearsal.
Note
Pausing the time for the slide pauses the time for the whole presentation timer as well.
At the end of your presentation, you will notice a nice pop-up that says “The total time for the slide show was H:MM:SS. Do you want to keep the new slide timings to use when you view the slide show?” (Figure 15.31 shows this.)
Figure 15.31 When finished with Rehearse Timings, a pop-up asks if you want to keep the timings for use during Slide Show.
If you choose Yes, the timings for each slide are saved. The next time you enter Slide Show (press F5), you won’t have to manually transition between slides. They will automatically change based on the timings you recorded. If you want to keep the timings, but then want to enter the slideshow without using the timings temporarily, go to the Slide Show tab in the Set Up group and uncheck the Use Rehearsed Timings box.
Note
If you save the timings, your view will automatically be changed to Slide Sorter View so that the timing for each slide can be verified and adjusted.
If you choose No, nothing will happen, and you can continue as normal or try to rehearse again. Perhaps you only wanted to get a rough estimate of how much time the presentation will take and still transition between slides yourself during the real thing.
Additionally, if you choose No and remove the timings from the slides, it might take a second for PowerPoint to remove all the timings. Also, if you save timings on one pass and don’t save them on the next pass, the first timings are restored. In other words, the timings are not removed.
Tip
When estimating how much time a presentation takes, don’t assume that your actual presentation will take exactly the same amount of time as your rehearsal. Always leave a little buffer time for audience questions. If the presentation involves feedback from the audience, factor in even more time for discussion.
Also be sure to remember the pause/black/white buttons that are available at presentation time. More on this can be found in Chapter 16.
Creating Self-Playing Presentations
Ever see those self-playing PowerPoint presentations that jump by themselves between slides? We used to regularly see these while waiting in line at the local Taco Bell, looping though the 3 to 4 monthly specials, and we don’t think they had a guy in the back advancing the slides by hand.
Let’s make deeper use of the Rehearse Timings feature to construct a self-playing presentation.
Record How Long to Stay on Each Slide
Similar to the previous section, we need to record how long we want to stay on each slide.
1. Create a PowerPoint presentation with a few slides. You can open a presentation you already have. Or, just insert a few slides (press Ctrl+M) and type something on each inserted slide.
2. Now start the Rehearse Timings Feature on the Slide Show tab by going to the Set Up group and choosing Rehearse Timings.
3. You’re now in Slide Show mode with a timer. This records how long to stay on each slide. So, if you want your final show to stay on slide 1 for 10 seconds, wait 10 seconds before you advance to the next slide. You can use the leftmost Play arrow to advance slides, the Pause arrow to pause, or the third button to reset the clock for the current slide.
Note
It’s a good idea to have someone else read the content aloud to ensure that those viewing the presentation will be able to keep up.
4. When you arrive at the last slide, press Esc to exit the slideshow. PowerPoint will ask you whether to keep the timings; choose Yes.
Review Timings
You’re now plopped into Slide Sorter view (see Figure 15.32). Notice how each slide has a time underneath it, telling you the timing value for each slide.
Figure 15.32 Slide Sorter view shows you the timings for each slide.
If it’s massively off, just reread the “Record How Long to Stay on Each Slide” section earlier in this chapter to start over.
If just one or two slides need to be fixed up, select the slide and go to the Animations tab in the Transition to This Slide group. You will see the current time value in the rightmost text box labeled Automatically After (see Figure 15.33). Change the number to change the timing information for the selected slide.
Figure 15.33 Update timing information for a particular slide under the Animations tab.
Note
The time you enter is very precise, not just to the nearest second; it goes to the nearest millisecond.
Set Up the Loop
Okay, now we have timing information for each slide. To make this self-running, we need to make sure that the presentation loops, repeating itself when it reaches the end of the presentation. To do that,
1. Go to the Slide Show tab in the Set Up group and choose Set Up Slide Show to launch the Set Up Slide Show dialog, which is covered more in Chapter 16.
2. In the Show Options section, check Loop Continuously Until ‘Esc’ and click OK.
Run the Show
And that’s it. Just enter the slideshow (press F5), and your presentation will play and loop by itself until you press the Esc key.
Note
Another way to set up a self-running presentation is via Kiosk mode, which is described more in Chapter 16.
Pre-Record Your Presentation (Record Narration)
Along the same lines as Rehearse Timings is a feature that lets you record yourself giving a presentation. This is extremely useful for giving lectures and sharing presentations with those who cannot attend. It gives you a way to attach your voice to the slides that is helpful for those who want to review your presentation without bringing a recorder to your presentation and pausing and rewinding while looking at your slides.
Note
You need a microphone to use this feature.
Start the Record Narration feature by going to the Slide Show tab in the Set Up group and choosing Record Narration. This brings up the Record Narration dialog (see Figure 15.34).
Figure 15.34 The Record Narration dialog.
Sound Quality
Notice the Current recording quality section describing the current quality of the sound used. You can change the quality used, which is dependent on the format of audio used and the attributes of the audio. Based on the Quality setting, a Disk Use summary is shown, indicating how much disk space is taken up per second. This gives you a nice little summary of how much free space you have at the current save location and how many minutes you can record without running out of space.
You can change the Quality setting to decrease the amount of disk space you are using, for example. Click on the Change Quality button.
Testing the Microphone
Next, a good thing to do is test the microphone level. This will tell you whether you need to adjust the sensitivity of your microphone to avoid too much noise and also whether it is loud enough to capture your voice. It’s important that you give a few test words into the microphone with this Microphone Check dialog open. It will help you ensure that a quality recording is made.
It’s recommended to read the sentence shown in the dialog because it is set up to help ensure that things work correctly. The test is self adjusting; it will set the level correctly based on the input.
Linked Narrations
If you select the Link Narrations In check box at the bottom of the dialog and select a location, the audio for each slide will be recorded into a .wav file and saved into that directory. PowerPoint creates links to those sounds inside your presentation. This is good practice if you want to edit the narration later with a separate sound editor.
If you decide to Record Narration and Link narrations into a separate folder, remember to transfer the sound files whenever you transfer your presentation somewhere. If you do not, the presentation will have no way of knowing where to get the sound from. We recommend saving the sounds to the same folder as your presentation.
If you start narration in the middle of a presentation, a dialog asks you whether to start recording on the current slide or the first slide.
Narrations and Slides
Now notice that the slide has a sound icon in the lower right corner, indicating that audio will play when this slide is encountered in Slide Show mode (see Figure 15.35).
Figure 15.35 The narrations come as sounds attached to slides, which play automatically when in Slide Show mode.
What if I want to start halfway through my presentation? You can! Select a slide that isn’t the first one and click on Record Narration, and you will be greeted with a nice prompt, as shown in Figure 15.36, asking whether you want to start recording from the current slide or the first slide. This is a great way to rerecord only select slides without having to redo the entire presentation.
Figure 15.36 It’s possible to start recording the narration from any slide.
When finished with the recording, another prompt asks if you want to save the slide timings. This is exactly the same as Rehearse Timings. If you save it, the next time you start Slide Show, it will know when to transition to the next slide.
Hide Slide
Sometimes you do not want certain slides to appear in your slideshow, but you don’t want to delete the slides yet for one reason or another.
You can find the option to hide these slides by going to the Slide Show tab in the Set Up group and choosing Hide Slide. When selected, a slash will be put around the current slide under the Slide Thumbnail pane, and its thumbnail will be grayed out (see Figure 15.37). The slide will not automatically appear during the presentation in Slide Show mode.
Figure 15.37 With Hide Slide selected, a slash is added to the slide number in the Thumbnail pane to denote that this slide is hidden and will not appear during Slide Show Mode.
Tip
Hidden slides do not appear when going through the presentation slide by slide, but they can be navigated to using the slide number or a hyperlink.