When it comes to animating a PowerPoint presentation, you can choose between animation schemes, the prebuilt special effects made by the Microsoft elves, or customized animations that you build on your own. Only fans of animation and people with a lot of time on their hands go the second route. (An animation is movement on the slide. For example, you can animate bulleted lists on slides so that the bullet points appear on-screen one at a time when you click the mouse, rather than all at one time.)
Choosing an animation scheme
Follow these steps to preview and choose an animation scheme for slides:
1. In Normal view, select the slide or slides that need an animation scheme.
2. Choose Slide Show --> Animation Schemes.
The Slide Design task pane opens, except that now it lists animation schemes, as shown in Figure 1. If you scroll down the list of schemes, you will see that they fall into these categories: Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting.
Figure 1: Applying animation schemes for fun or profit.
3. Select an animation scheme.
As soon as you select a scheme, the on-screen slide is "animated." Click the Play button to see the scheme again. Keep trying animations until you find the one that suits you.
The flying star icon appears beside animated slides in Slide Sorter view and on the Slide pane in Normal view (the star also appears next to slides that have been assigned a transition). To "unanimate" a slide, select it, choose Slide Show --> Animation Schemes, and choose No Animation in the Slide Design task pane.
Fashioning your own animation scheme
To fashion an animation scheme of your own, you tell PowerPoint what part of the slide you want to animate, how you want to animate that part, in which order the different parts of the slides are animated, and how long each animation lasts.
To start, select a slide in Normal view and choose Slide Show --> Custom Animation. Then click the slide to select which part to animate, click the Add Effect button, and choose options in the Custom Animation task pane. The options you get depend on the type of animation you're dealing with.
