Ms Office Tune Up

When you put together and present a PowerPoint slide show, you should avoid a malaise that is sometimes called triple delivery-having the same text on the screen, on a handout, and spoken aloud. Most presenters avoid the triple delivery problem by making their bullet points relatively terse and then expanding on the point orally. Unfortunately, when your speech departs significantly from the bullet text, your audience may forget which bullet is the current one. You can solve that problem by reiterating the bullet text from time to time or by pointing at the text as you speak.

Neither of these solutions is that great because you need to remember to perform them while you’re extemporizing. A much better solution is to have the current bullet point emphasized by, say, bold or underlined text or by applying a different font size or color. These effects are available in the Emphasis category. However, you need to be careful: In most cases, PowerPoint doesn’t reverse the effect automatically. Ideally, you want the emphasis applied to only one bullet at a time. That is, when you apply the emphasis effect to the next bullet, PowerPoint should remove the effect from the previous bullet.

The easiest way to set this up is to use the Change Font Style effect, which enables you to emphasize bullet text by applying bold, -italic, or underline. Best of all, the Change Font Style effect comes with a property that enables you to automatically remove the font style from the current bullet when you move to the next bullet.

Follow these steps to set this up:

1. Select the placeholder containing the bullets you want to animate.
2. Choose Animations, Custom Animation to display the Custom Animation task pane.
3. Choose Add Effect, Emphasis, Change Font Style.
4. In the Custom Animation task pane, use the Font Style list to click the style you want to apply: Bold, Italic, or Underline.
5. Use the Duration list to click Until Next Click.

Most of the other effects in the Emphasis category don’t have the handy Duration property. In these cases, you need to “de-emphasize” the effect by hand by adding a second emphasis effect that reverses the original one.

For example, I occasionally like to emphasize text using the Grow/Shrink effect. (For text, this gives the same result as the Change Font Size effect.) For example, I might grow the text to 125 percent of its original size to make it stand out from the other bullets. Reversing this is a bit tricky, however, because you can’t just return the text to 100 percent. Instead, you need to apply the effect to the text’s current size. So if you grow the text using 125 per­cent, you reverse that by shrinking it using 80 percent.

TIP

One relatively easy way to calculate the correct shrinking percentage is to use fractions. Convert the growth percentage to a fraction and then reverse the top and bottom.The resulting fraction gives you the shrink percentage. For example, 125 percent is 125/100 which reduces to 5/4 (dividing the top and bottom by 25), so reversing that gives 4/5, which expands to 80/100 (multiplying the top and bottom by 20) or 80 percent. Similarly, a growth of 150 percent is 3/2, so the reverse is 2/3, or about 67 percent for the shrink factor.

In this case, you must work with the bullets individually; you cannot work with the place­holder. There are a number of ways to go about this, but I find the following method the easiest one to manage:

1. For each bullet, select the text of the bullet and then choose Add Effect, Emphasis, Grow/Shrink.
2. Select all the effects you created in step 1, pull down the Size list, use the Custom text to enter a growth value (that is, a percentage greater than 100), and then press Enter.
3. For each bullet except the last one, select the text of the bullet and then choose Add Effect, Emphasis, Grow/Shrink.

NOTE

Why skip the last bullet in Step 3? Because clicking after you are done with this bullet should take you to the next slide.

4. Select all the effects you created in Step 3, pull down the Size list, use the Custom text box to enter a shrink value (that is, a percentage less than 100) that reverses the growth value from Step 2, and then press Enter.
5. With the effects from Step 3 still selected, use the Start list to click With Previous. This tells PowerPoint to apply the shrink effect on the current bullet at the same time as it applies the grow effect to the next bullet.
6. For each effect you created in Step 3, click the effect and then use the Re-Order arrows to position the effect below the growth effect of whatever bullet follows it. For example, if you have four slides A, B, C, and D, the order should look like this:

A – Grow
B – Grow
A – Shrink
C – Grow
B – Shrink
D – Grow
C – Shrink

7. In the Custom Animation pane, press Ctrl+A to select all of the effects. (If you have other effects in the list, hold down Ctrl and click all of the effects from Steps 1 and 3, instead.) Use the Speed list to click Very Fast. (Grow/Shrink effects look best at top speed.)

Figure 1 shows a slide with five bullets that have grow (125 percent) and shrink (80 per­cent) effects applied.

Figure 1 A slide with both grow and shrink effects added to the bullets.

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