Presentation Tips: Killer Animation Slides for PowerPoint
Not many people use animations in their slides because of the following reasons:
Too much work with low payback
It is a lot of work to incorporate animations in every slide. Furthermore, it takes even more effort practice controlling the effect timing in an animated PowerPoint presentation. Last but not least, if the computer that hosts your presentation does not have enough memory or has an older PowerPoint version installed, the animations might not be able to display properly.
Inflexibility for using timed animation
To incorporate animation in your PowerPoint slides, there are two options you can choose from. One of the options is known as “timed animation”. If you choose this option, the animation plays without you being able to control its speed. That simply means that you have to control the speed of your speech perfectly in order to match the on-going animation. You are very lightly to screw up because everyone tends to speak faster on stage. In addition, there is always someone from the crowd who might interrupt you with a question in the middle of your presentation. Finally, timed animation limits your ability to expand your points and give extra examples.If you choose the other option, “on-click animation”, you will be able to manually pause the animation with mouse clicks. This is a a wiser way to utilize animation. However, please be prepared to bring a wireless mouse. Otherwise, you would lose your flexibility to walk around the stage.
Appear as not professional
If you have incorporated inappropriate animations in your slide package, your presentation simply will not look professional.So, does this mean we shouldn’t use any animations in our slide show?
The answer is no. There are some places that we could use animations in our slide show to add value to the entire presentation:
Beginning of the presentation
Adding a flash animation or video at the beginning of your presentation could help wake up your audience. John Allison, HR Director of Fedex, likes to show their corporate video close to the beginning of his presentation. This is a wise move to get the audience to know more about the company as an introduction.If your flash animation or video has sound features, make sure you set it up properly before the show.
Slide Transition Effect
You can use slide transition effects to make your entire slide package look more Professional. However, keep in mind that not all slide transition effects are business-like. I personally prefer using the “fade smoothly”, “fade through black”, “cut” and “cut through black” slide transition effects. The “newsflash” slide transition effect works very well with music if you are posting news in the next slide. The “random bars horizontal” slide transition effect works well if you are posting a movie in the next slide.
Video background
Set your video as background in the PowerPoint presentation. Play your video after you have gone through the bullet points on your slide.
Bullet Point
Some speakers like to use the “appear” or “fade” feature to make their bullet points appear one by one. This is a good strategy to make your audience focus on one key point at a time.Another way to do this is to first have all the bullet points ready on the slide and use the “emphasis – set font style” feature to bold the point you are talking about. When you finish talking about that specific point, use the “emphasis – transparency” feature to deemphasize that bullet point.
When you deemphasize the finished bullet point, set timing to zero and apply “emphasis – set font style” feature to bold the next bullet point.
Graphics/ Models
Another good spot to use animation is when you are showing a graph or a model. You might want to first show the sales projection for the next 6 months and then show the entire projection.My final tip for you is not to focus too much on animation. Remember, audience concerns the most about the content and your presentation techniques. They can always live with no animations in the overall slide show, so try to minimize your time to do fancy animations next time when you present!
