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!