Having too much stuff on a slide all at once can be frustrating for the audience. They have to divide their attention between the slide and the presenter, a needless distraction. If you’re guilty of putting too much on a slide, maybe it’s because you think animation is difficult or too time consuming. Well, here’s a way to animate your slides that’s simple, effective and fast!
This works best for slides with solid-color backgrounds. For the purposes of this lesson, we’re going with a basic white background. Classy!
Step 1: Create a slide with lots of stuff on it
No problem, right? Here’s an example:
Your slide might be a bullet point list, objects, or any number of things. Make sure that the objects on your slide don’t touch each other.
Step 2: Duplicate the slide
Figure out how many animations you want to reveal the information a little at a time. In this case it’s easy: five steps = five animations. So I need five copies of the same busy slide, like this:
Step 3: Start covering stuff up
On slide 1, cover up all but the first step with a solid white rectangle with no outline. (To show you where to place the rectangle, I’ve labeled it and added a dashed outline.) On slide 2, cover up all but the first and second steps. Keep going like this until the final slide, which doesn’t receive any cover-up.
Slide 1
.
Slide 2
Slide 3
Slide 4
Slide 5 (the original slide)
Now the magic happens
When you view this presentation in Slide Show mode, you’ll see that it’s animated like this:
How easy was that? Enjoy your newfound animation skills!
Cool trick with this white rectangle, Laura. This kind of “manual” animation is actually perfect when exporting to PDF. And this is great way for adding animations when publishing at Slideshare.