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Engage your audience with triggers

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You can create interactive presentations either to engage a live audience as you present or to let people interact with slides on their own.

You can use triggers to create quizzes and games, or just create a more engaging way of interacting with your audience. Once you learn this technique, you’ll find many ways to use it.

Let’s say you’ve covered a topic and you want your trainees to talk more about it. You could create a slide that looks like this:

But you have a secret up your sleeve! When your first trainee explains the first topic, you click that “Define expectations” rounded rectangle (it can be any shape you want) and your version of the explanation appears. You can then compare the trainee’s answer with yours. Now, the slide looks like this…

You can continue by clicking each topic until the slide looks like this

Important: You can click the boxes in any order and the correct explanation will pop up.

So, how do you accomplish that magic? With triggers!

Here are the steps:

1. Create the slide with all of the objects on it.

2. Animate the objects that you want to appear when you click. I used a Fade Entrance animation but it could be anything. You can select all of them and animate them at one time. The order doesn’t make a difference. To do that, click the Animations tab, then Add Animation in the Advanced Animation group, and choose one of the Entrance animations from the gallery that drops down. You can go to the bottom and click More Entrance Effects, if you want. You can set the timing and options as you wish.

3. Open the Selection pane. On the Home tab, you go to the Editing group, Select, Selection Pane. If you have a shape selected, you can click the Shape Format tab, and click Selection Pane. You do this because you need to rename the objects so you can tell which is which.

4. Select the first object you want to click. In my case that was the rounded rectangle that says “Define expectations.” In the Selection pane, all of the objects now look something like this, which isn’t very helpful.

5. You can use the Selection pane to rename your objects. This is very valuable for animation. Click the first object on the slide to select it and you’ll see it selected in the Selection pane. Click in the object’s name, delete the current text, and type in a new name. I just called it “Define expectations.”

6. Repeat that with the other objects you want to click. The Selection pane now looks like this>>> You can see that the 3 shapes that I want to click are now named according to the text they contain. (You don’t need to name the animated objects, although you can.)

7. Now, click the object you want to appear when you click the first shape, in this case, it’s the text that says, “Ensure everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and the goals they need to achieve.”

8. With that shape selected, click the Animations tab and then click Trigger in the Advanced Animations group. (Trigger won’t be active unless you have already animated that object.) When you do that, a drop-down appears that says, “On Click of” and you see another drop-down with a list of your objects.

9. Because you’ve named them, you can choose the desired object easily. In this case, I chose “Define expectations.” This means that when I click the “Define expectations” shape, the shape that says, “Ensure everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and the goals they need to achieve” will Fade in.

10. Continue to set the triggers for the other animated objects.

Note: You can only see the effect in Slide Show view or Reading view.

Here are some other posts that cover triggers:

Add pop-up text to explain a slide

Use triggers to create interactive presentations

What’s next?

Try different animations and as many variations as you can think of.

How do you think you’ll use this? Leave a comment or ask a question below!

Create an animated intro for videos in PowerPoint

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powerpoint-tips-animated-introIf you want to create a series of short training or promotional videos, it’s useful to have an intro that you put in front of each video. This might include your company’s branding or just create a theme that viewers associate with your videos.

Since you’ll be adding a video, it looks better when you animate the intro so that the intro isn’t static. You can easily create animation in PowerPoint that is quite video-like.

This is the animated intro I’ll describe in this post.

After the intro, you’ll add the main message or training, which can be: [Read more…]

Circle an object

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A great way to emphasize and draw attention to an object on a slide is to circle it.

circle object

Of course, the easy way is to insert a circle, and use the Appear or Fade entrance animation. Be sure to format the circle with no fill. I like to use a red outline and give it a weight of at least 2 pt. To format the circle, follow these steps:

  1. Right-click and choose Format Shape.
  2. In the Fill section, choose No Fill from the drop-down list.
  3. In the Line section, choose a red color and change the Weight.

To add the animation, select the circle, and choose Animations tab. Choose Add Effect or Add Animation> Entrance> Appear or Fade.

But wouldn’t it be more effective for the animation to circle the object? In other words, your audience would see the circle draw itself around the object. You can do this using the Wheel animation. Follow these steps:

  1. Insert a circle over an object. Format the object as just described so that it has no fill.
  2. Select the circle.
  3. Display the Animations tab.
  4. Choose Choose Add Effect or Add Animation> Entrance> Wheel.
  5. In the Animation task pane or Effect Options drop-down, change the number in the Spokes text box to 1 (if it is set to another value)
  6. Play the animation. You’ll see the circle drawn around the object.

Let’s go even further. We might want the circle to have more character. Instead, wouldn’t it be interesting if the circle was drawn with crayon or lipstick?

lipstick circle

Here’s how I did it:

circle an object

  1. I drew circles with lipstick on a white sheet of paper.
  2. I photographed them with my digital camera and uploaded the photo to my computer.
  3. I inserted the photo onto a slide and cropped it to the bottom circle. Use the Picture Tools Format tab> Size group> Crop button.)
  4. I made the background transparent. On the Picture Tools Format tab> Adjust group> Recolor drop-down> Set Transparent Color. Click on the background.
  5. I moved and resized the circle to encircle the object, a photo of a peacock feather.
  6. To add the animation, display the Animations tab.
  7. Choose Add Effect or Add Animation> Entrance> Wheel.
  8. In the Custom Animation task pane or Effect Options drop-down, change the number in the Spokes text box to 1, if necessary
  9. The animation always starts at the top and this meant that a little of the left end of the circle showed at the beginning of the animation. To counteract that, I rotated the circle slightly counterclockwise.
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Use triggers to create interactive presentations

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powerpoint-tips-triggers-interactive-1Audiences today want an interactive experience. As a presenter, you can:

  • Ask them questions
  • Answer their questions
  • Organize small group exercises

But you can do more.

You can also integrate your audience into the presentation itself. For example, you can create a menu slide that links to other parts of the presentation (or other presentations) and let your audience decide the order of the presentation. I explain one way to create a menu slide here.

Another way to get the audience involved is to create mini-quizzes on your slides. You can also provide additional explanation if an audience member wants it. These techniques work well when you are presenting in front of an audience but also allow you to create interactive presentations that audiences navigate on their own in front of a computer.

You can do this with PowerPoint’s Trigger feature. (At the end of this post, there’s good news if you have a Mac!)

What are triggers?

[Read more…]