Less is More

Quick reference

• 00:04 To me, PowerPoint animations are an important tool that help you deliver an effective presentation to your audience, and that’s
• 00:09 whether it’s by an individual viewing your presentation by themself without a live presenter, or whether they’re part of a number of
• 00:15 people in the audience with a live speaker. This video is about a very important animation fact and that is less is more. It’s one of a number of
• 00:24 videos that relate to animation. The other videos cover the specifics of adding, changing or deleting animations and the animation pane. The
• 00:32 presentation that you’re viewing now is available for download as part of this module, and I encourage you to look at the various slides to
• 00:38 see the animations that have been applied. If we look at slide 1, we can see that there’s a number of objects on the slide, and that’s
• 00:45 graphics and textboxes and it looks quite cluttered. However, let’s click on the animations tab, in the animation pane button. We can see
• 00:54 that all the objects on the slide are indeed animated. Again, how these animations were created is the subject of other videos. But let’s
• 01:01 go to slideshow mode by pressing F5 on the keyboard and see how these animations play. Notice that all of the objects except for the title:
• 01:09 Why we animate, are indeed hidden. When I press ENTER on the keyboard, the next animations fires, the title text exits and the
• 01:17 textbox that contains the text: remove clutter, appears with an entrance animation. Hit ENTER again and that text disappears with an exit
• 01:26 animation and a new textbox that contains the text: reveal items in stages, appears. And that’s really the power of animation; bringing in objects
• 01:35 on the slide exactly when we need them to reduce clutter. So let’s continue to go through the slide and I’ll speak to it as though I’m
• 01:42 presenting it to an audience with a few interspersed comments. So again, I hit ENTER on the keyboard to fire the next animation. The
• 01:49 various meeting types are face to face, informal, or online. I press Enter again on the keyboard. Animations allow us to focus attention to
• 01:58 specific locations on the slide. Keep your eyes on the word “online”. When I press ENTER, an emphasis animation is added which underlines
• 02:06 the word. Or if that’s too subtle, I can add a shape in the form of an arrow with an entrance animation of wipe from right. So again on this
• 02:14 slide we can see that animations break the story that our slide supports into specific chunks that we can speak about and it reduces
• 02:22 clutter and focuses attention on specific parts on the slide. Please note that the animations you add will depend on the type of
• 02:29 presentation you are constructing. For example, a presentation self delivered by someone is where the presentation effectively delivers itself.
• 02:37 The presenter or the designer who developed the presentation may’ve left a voiceover prepared beforehand or may deliver the presentation
• 02:44 remotely over the internet via an online broadcast, and that’s effectively the kind of presentation you’re watching now. You can’t see
• 02:51 me wave my arms around or point to anything on the slide. So the animations will be more dynamic and exciting to keep the audience’s
• 02:58 attention and you’ll need a certain amount of emphasis animations to direct the audience attention to particular locations on the slide. In a
• 03:07 live presentation, in this graphic, the gentleman, even though he’s presenting with a flipchart, he could be using a presentation on a television or
• 03:15 on a large screen like in a conference. It’s the person who is the animated interface in the presentation so the animations need to be more
• 03:22 subtle, so that they don’t distract from the person presenting. The person can also point to locations on the slide and direct the audience
• 03:30 attention to specific locations on those slides. So let’s look at this concept by viewing two slides. In this slide, if I was presenting it live, I
• 03:38 would introduce each line of text on mouse click or clicking ENTER on the keyboard. That way I’ve got total control over when each element is
• 03:47 introduced within the presentation. For a self- delivered presentation, I might bring all of the text in together with an entrance animation and
• 03:55 then use an emphasis animation to brush on a color as I speak about each particular item. Now the most important concept to learn from this
• 04:02 sequence of animated objects on slides is that less is more. Animation is movement and it attracts attention. Done poorly, it can be very
• 04:10 distracting. We can understand that by looking at a particular slide that I’ve constructed. On this slide, I want the audience to focus on the word
• 04:18 customers. I’ve added a motion path animation and that makes the word move downward and then backwards with an auto reverse. Again,
• 04:26 please download this presentation to view the specific animation that was added and details on constructing various animations are
• 04:32 contained in other videos. When the word customers moves, it has the effect of focusing your attention on that word. However, if I use the
• 04:39 same animation on the four other words, which are costs, sales, marketing, and reputation, it diverts your attention to those words and
• 04:48 distracts you from looking at the words that I want you to focus on. So in summary, animations allow you to break down complex
• 04:55 topics into chunks that help your audience to understand your message; they allow you to focus the audience attention to a particular area
• 05:01 on your side but most importantly, less is more. Keep working at understanding animations and remember the other videos available and this
• 05:11 presentation available for download.

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