animation Archives | PowerPoint Tips Blog

Create an animated intro for videos in PowerPoint

March 4, 2020 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

If 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

June 1, 2019 by Ellen Finkelstein 7 Comments

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

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:

Right-click and choose Format Shape.
In the Fill section, choose No Fill from the drop-down list.
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:

Insert a circle over an object. Format the object as just described so that it has no fill.
Select the circle.
Display the Animations tab.
Choose Choose Add Effect or Add Animation> Entrance> Wheel.
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)
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?

Here’s how I did it:

I drew circles with lipstick on a white sheet of paper.
I photographed them with my digital camera and uploaded the photo to my computer.
I inserted the photo onto a slide and cropped it to the bottom circle. Use the Picture Tools Format tab> Size group> Crop button.)
I made the background transparent. On the Picture Tools Format tab> Adjust group> Recolor drop-down> Set Transparent Color. Click on the background.
I moved and resized the circle to encircle the object, a photo of a peacock feather.
To add the animation, display the Animations tab.
Choose Add Effect or Add Animation> Entrance> Wheel.
In the Custom Animation task pane or Effect Options drop-down, change the number in the Spokes text box to 1, if necessary
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.

How do you call attention to objects on a slide?

Use triggers to create interactive presentations

September 16, 2018 by Ellen Finkelstein Leave a Comment

Audiences 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…]

Slow image animation for a cinematic look

May 25, 2018 by Ellen Finkelstein 14 Comments

A common type of animation in videos is a very slow zoom in or out — or a pan — of an image. In this post, I’ll show you how to do this in PowerPoint.

First, watch the video.

Insert your image

[Read more…]

How to animate 3D objects in PowerPoint

March 13, 2018 by Ellen Finkelstein 8 Comments

If you have Office 365 (the subscription version) and the Creative edition of Windows 10, you can insert 3D objects into PowerPoint. I explained this feature in an earlier blog post, “How to Insert 3D in PowerPoint.”

Now, you can apply 5 special 3D animations to 3D models on your slides:

Arrive: Fades in the object and turns it slightly
Turntable: Turns the object around
Swing: Rotates the object slightly back and forth
Jump & Turn: Makes the object jump up, turn around, and then come back down. It’s great for grasshoppers!
Leave: Fades out the object and turns it slightly

Before I go on, watch this video of a presentation using some of these animations. It uses the Arrive, Turntable, and Leave animations.

These new animations are specifically for 3D objects and they facilitate showing the objects at various angles to highlight their third dimension. Of course, you can still use other animations. In the video, I also used the Grow/Shrink animation, for example.

You have lots of options, as well. For any animation, click Effect Options to the right of the Animation Gallery to see them. Here you see the options for the Turntable animation. As you can see, you can change the direction, amount of turn, and the rotation axis.

You still have the usual animation options such as Start (On Click, With Previous, or After Previous), Duration, and Delay.

Morph transitions can be particularly effective with 3D objects.

Finding 3D objects

Finding 3D objects is still the biggest challenge. In “How to insert 3D into PowerPoint,” I explained how to create them in Paint 3D.

Microsoft maintains a community library of 3D objects, Remix 3D. Most of the 3D objects there seem silly to me. I recently sent Microsoft a list of objects I thought would be useful to use as metaphors in a wide variety of business situations, like the fence in the above video–I’m using it as a metaphor for an obstacle. I hope they will expand the 3D objects so they are useful in more situations.

When you upgrade to Windows 10 Creator Update and get Paint 3D, you get a small library of 3D objects in a new 3D Objects folder. You can see that here:

You can use these 3D models as building blocks for your creations in Paint 3D.

Here’s how I created the fence:

I drew it as a 3D object in AutoCAD.
I exported it as an STL file.
I imported it into Paint 3D.
I attached a wood grain sticker.
I exported it as an OBJ file.
I imported it into PowerPoint using Insert, 3D Models.

That’s a lot of steps! But methods like these are how many presenters will create the very specific models they need. Here’s a long list of 3D modeling software from Wikipedia.

Some presenters have had difficulty using 3D models that they bought from stock libraries because the models came into PowerPoint without the materials or sticker. As a result, the models were all white. This is apparently caused by the material being in a separate file from the model. Also, there are many file types and not all programs support all file types. Suffice it to say that the field of creating and displaying 3D models for non-professional modelers is still in flux.

Nevertheless, the ability to display and animate 3D objects in PowerPoint is an exciting opportunity!

Have you played around with 3D models in PowerPoint? Do you see a use for them? Please leave a comment and share this post using the social media buttons below.