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About this lesson
Have the confidence to know exactly what to animate without driving your audience crazy.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the PowerPoint presentation used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Less is More.pptx651.2 KB
Quick reference
Topic
‘Less is more’: How less animation can have more impact.
When to use
When animating a presentation.
Instructions
- Before you start to animate a presentation, consider this about the two main types of PowerPoint presentation:
- A kiosk presentation can be relatively dynamic, particularly in the use of emphasis animations.
- A presentation delivered live by a speaker should have more subtle animations so that the presentation doesn’t ‘dominate’ or ‘drown out’ the speaker.
- Animation should be employed to break down a complex topic into its constituent parts and bring them in one-by-one to support your story and enhance the audience’s understanding.
Also note:
You should ensure the animation supports the story being told and that it doesn’t interfere with yourself or someone else who is the live presenter.
You can’t point manually to an object on the screen in a kiosk presentation unless you are presenting it yourself to an audience. Therefore, emphasis animations are essential to highlight particular parts of the slide.
Also note:
You should ensure the animation supports the story being told and that it doesn’t interfere with yourself or someone else who is the live presenter.
You can’t point manually to an object on the screen in a kiosk presentation unless you are presenting it yourself to an audience. Therefore, emphasis animations are essential to highlight particular parts of the slide.
Login to download- 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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