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Become an animaniac: Impress your audience by controlling your bullet points.

In this example, we take a few simple bullet points and have them appear on successive mouse clicks.

Transcript
Welcome to Teaming for Technology’s tip number 73. Today we’re working with PowerPoint and I’m going to show you how to animate basic bullet points.

Here’s the scenario: We’ve got a one-slide presentation with three bullet points. If we were to ‘play’ this slide for our audience, we’d see all three bullets at the same time. The issue with this is that there are few things worse than when you’re talking about bullet #1 and an audience member asks a question about bullet #3. The solution to this is to display each bullet point on their own while they’re addressed. The first click of your mouse will display bullet #1, click again to get bullet #2 and finally a last click to view the third bullet.

We accomplish this using the Animate feature in PowerPoint. The more recent versions of PowerPoint (2007 and 2010) make this extremely easy to do. We’ll just click within our text area and then head up to the Animations Tab. You’ll see in the top left an Animate section that defaults to “No Animation.” By clicking on the little down arrow, you’ll see several options: Fade, Wipe and Fly In. Each of these also has two sub-options: All At Once or By 1st Level Paragraph.

If we were to select ‘All At Once,’ PowerPoint would display all three bullet points at the same time upon your mouse click. This doesn’t exactly accomplish what we’re going for today. But by clicking on ‘By 1st Level Paragraph,’ we’ll get each bullet displaying on its own. PowerPoint gives you an auto-preview feature that demonstrates what it will look like. This auto-preview displays each bullet in order automatically, but when you actually play the presentation you’ll be in control of when to display each bullet.

Let’s head down to the Fly In effect and select ‘By First Level Paragraph.’ Then let’s head up to our Slide Show Ribbon and play the presentation from the beginning. There you have it: The title to begin with and each bullet appearing with successive mouse clicks.

Once again, you accomplish this by clicking in your text area, heading up to the Animations Tab and selecting any of animations ‘By 1st Level Paragraph.’
Thanks for watching T4T’s tip #73. We’ll see you next time.