Ms Office Tune Up

In a typical animation, you click anywhere on the slide and PowerPoint applies the effect to the object associated with the animation. However, it’s also possible to set up the anima­tion so that you have to click a particular object on the screen to initiate the effect for the animated element. The object you click to launch another object’s animation is called a trigger. For example, you can put a shape in the corner of the slide and set it up as a trigger so that the slide’s bullet points run their entrance effect only when you click that shape.

There are many uses for triggers. For example, in an interactive kiosk presentation that presents educational material, you can set things up so that a slide displays only certain material or moves on to the next slide only if the user clicks the “correct” part of the slide, which you’ve set up as a trigger. However, my favorite use for triggers is to help overcome an annoying limitation inherent in PowerPoint animations. That is, there’s no easy way to repeat an animation; when you click the slide, the animation runs, and that’s it. Yes, you can apply multiple effects to the same element, but that just gets messy, particularly when your other animated elements are on the same slide.

A good example that illustrates the usefulness of repeating animation is a slide in which you want to show both text and a large image. A typical slide isn’t likely big enough to show both at once, so you add two effects to the image: an entrance effect and an exit effect. This lets you click once to display the image when you’re ready for it and then click again to remove the image when you are done with it. Of course, as soon as the image is gone, an audience member asks to see it again. Unfortunately, with regular animation effects, the only way to do that is to move back to the previous slide, navigate ahead to the current slide, and run the animations from the beginning. This is not very professional, to say the least.

Fortunately you can easily overcome this kind of problem by setting up a trigger to run the effect. You can click the trigger anytime you like, and PowerPoint will repeat the effect. For something like the image animation, you can set up one trigger to show the image and a second trigger to make it disappear.

Here are the steps to follow to configure a slide object with two triggers-one to display it and one to hide it:

1. On the slide containing the element you want to animate, insert the objects you want to use as triggers. Good trigger candidates are shapes because you can add text to them.
2. Click the element you want to animate and then add the first effect (for example, an Entrance effect).
3. Drop down the first effect’s list and then click Timing. The effect’s dialog box displays (for example, if you’re working with the Fly In effect, you see the Fly In dialog box).
4. In the Timing tab, click Triggers, then click Start effect on click of, and then use the associated list to click the object that you want to use as a trigger for the effect. If the object includes text, PowerPoint shows that text along with the object’s name, as shown in Figure 1. Click OK. PowerPoint adds the trigger to the list of effects.


Figure 1 Use the Timing tab to set up another object as a trigger for the effect.

5. Click the element you want to animate and then add the second effect (for example, an Exit effect).
6. Drop down the second effect’s list and then click Timing. The effect’s dialog box dis­plays.
7. Repeat Step 4 to assign a different trigger to the second effect.

Figure 2 shows a slide with some text obscured behind a large image. The slide also includes two Rounded Rectangle shapes used as triggers. Clicking View Map displays the image; clicking Hide Map hides the image.

Figure 2 The View Map and Hide Map shapes are triggers that display and hide the large image.

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