PowerPoint Effects

Adding dynamic actions to a PowerPoint presentation is often done -- although it is rarely necessary.

Be warned.  Often, the use of PowerPoint effects will detract from your presentation.

You'll see some of the good and some of the bad here.

There are two broad classes of PowerPoint effects.  The first class involves the individual objects on a page, such as the bullet text lines.  The other class involves the transitions as you change from one slide to the next slide.

We'll look at these effects in that order.

Bullet Text Effects

Object effects are usually applied to lines of text that have been entered as bullet text.

You control when the next line of text appears by clicking the mouse.  (Note that when there are no bullet text effects, this would take you to the next slide.)

Usually all the lines of bullet text have the same effect, such as each line flying in from the left.

You have a rich set of choices on how your bullet text lines will appear.  The general effects also have some options.

Bullet Text Effects

This is a list of the general bullet text effects.  The terms are pretty expressive.

Directions & Scope

Once you have chosen a general effect, there are a number of specific options for that effect.

Here are a few examples.

• If you have a line simply appear, there are no options regarding the originating direction.
• If a bullet text line is to fly in, you have a choice of eight directions from which it will come.
• Zooming gives you a different set of direction options.

In addition to these options, you can have the text introduced as an entire text block, one word at a time, or even one letter at a time.

You can get a lot of variation if you combine all the general effects and the options.

Let's look at some of these.

Examples

These are all pretty good choices.

And Now, Something Different

I'm not so sure about some of these examples.  They can get very disturbing if they are used more than once. 

In some cases, once is too much.

Bullet Shade

The bullet shade effect "gray's out" a line of bullet text when a new one is presented.

This is useful because it emphasizes the current point being discussed, but it doesn't fully hide the previous points.

Slide Transitions

We are now ready for the other class of PowerPoint Effects.  These are the slide transitions.

Slide transitions occur when you go from one PowerPoint slide to the next.

You can see the names of the slide transition effects here.

Each type of transition has a direction and a speed.

You can see how these work with a few examples.