PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Create a pop-up window

A subscriber asks if it's possible to create a popup or cause an image to appear on a single slide only if it is clicked on or scrolled over in PowerPoint? He adds, "Like on a web page, I want to click or rollover a spot on the slide and reveal an explanation box or another small image or whatever, like a callout that only appears when you scroll over or click something. I use PPT 2003 on PC and PPT 2004 Mac."

Pop-up windows and images that appear when you click are a great way to add interactivity to PowerPoint. You can use them in an educational or business context.

One way to accomplish this on Windows (PC) is with triggers. (Unfortunately, the Mac version of PowerPoint doesn't support triggers.) What are triggers? They are objects that you click to cause some animation to occur. Essentially, you turn an object into a clickable button. To use this method, create the buttons and the pop-up windows. In this slide, the red dots are the buttons and I used AutoShape callouts for the pop-up windows. You could also use images or any other object that you can insert on a slide. For the entrance custom animation; I chose Zoom.

When you have your object animated, click its item in the Custom Animation task pane (it'll be selected there) and choose Timing to open the Zoom dialog box (the name of the dialog box is named according to the animation you chose).

Click the Triggers button and choose the Start Effect on Click of option. From the drop-down list, choose the object that you want to click. Click OK.

Repeat for each callout and button object.

Click here to see a movie of the result.

Tip: When you create a shape and then duplicate it many times, as I did with the red circles, they're named Oval 1, Oval 2, etc. This makes it hard to choose the right one when you need to choose a trigger. To discover a shape's name, add an animation to it and it'll appear in the Custom Animation task pane, with its name. Once you know its name, you can delete the animation. PowerPoint 2007 has a great feature, the Selection and Visibility task pane. (To display it, select an object, click the Format tab, look in the Arrange group for the Selection Pane button.) In this task pane, you can rename objects. This is a great help in animation, because you can give objects meaningful names.

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