Learning Outcomes
On completion of this section you will know
how to:
- Make paragraphs in your slide appear one by one as you require
them
- Dim old paragraphs when a new paragraph appears
Introduction
This chapter, and the ones that follow,
apply to presentations that are to be shown either on a computer monitor or on
a projection screen via a datashow projector. Here we shall concentrate on very simple, but
effective, means of showing the different paragraphs of a slide one by one. If we are giving a talk and we are using
slides to accompany the talk then it adds effectiveness to the overall
presentation if only the paragraph we are currently discussing is displayed
fully and the other paragraphs are either invisible or else faded.
Text animation
Text animation can only be performed only
on individual slides and thus if we want all of our slides animated we must do
them one by one. To commence animation
first go the slide you want animated and select the tab Animations. Here click on the icon Animation Pane in order to display this pane on the left of our
window. Now select the first paragraph or bullet point text in the text box and
click on the icon Add Animation. A
drop down list will appear as shown in Figure 2‑1. Here
click on Appear. Repeat the above actions for every other
paragraph or bullet point on your slide.
Your screen should now appear as in Figure 2‑2.
Figure 2‑1
Figure 2‑2
When we display the above slide as a slide
show only the heading will appear. In
order to see the first paragraph we either click the mouse or press the Enter
key. Either way the first paragraph or
bullet point appears. To see the second paragraph we click the mouse
again. We keep doing this until we have
seen all of the paragraphs and we automatically move on to the next slide.
The main reason for animating the text of a
slide is so that only the paragraph whose contents we are currently discussing
will be on the screen. This works for
the first paragraph of any slide, but subsequent paragraphs will have attention
drawn from them by the paragraphs above them. Ideally once we move on to a new
paragraph the previous paragraph should be dimmed. This has two advantages: the
old paragraph is not attracting attention away from the new one but the old
paragraph is still visible if we need to refer back to it.
We shall now look at how to dim a paragraph
when we move to the next one. To begin ensure that the Animation Pane is visible as in Figure 2‑2
above. Now select all of the animations
in that pane and right click on one of them.
This causes a pop up menu to appear as in Figure
2‑3
below.
Figure 2‑3
On this menu we shall click on Effect Options. This will cause a dialogue box as in Figure
2‑4 to
appear.
Figure 2‑4
In the combo box labeled After animation we select a colour for our
dimmed text. In our case we selected
grey. We then click on OK. Once we do this our job is complete and a paragraph
will become grey once the paragraph following it appears. This is shown in Figure
2‑5 where
we have moved to the second paragraph. As the second paragraph is black it
attracts the attention while the first one is still visible if we need to refer
to its contents.
Figure 2‑5