Not sure if specific computer questions are appropriate here, but I wasn’t sure where else to ask. Anyway, I recently saw a very nice computer presentation where the the speaker displayed all the text on a page first, then highlighted each line (changed text color) as she went along. It was a lot more pleasent than the jiggling red dot of a laser pointer. She also diesplayed a table and highlighted (changed background color of the cel this time) groups of cells as she went along.
I went home and tried to figure out to do it in PowerPoint, and I can’t find a way. Well, one way is to have two copies of the text box one on top of the other, and enable the animation on the top one. But that’s a huge pain! Is there any other way to do it? I’m using Microsoft Powerpoint 2000.
With my admittedly limited experience with PowerPoint, I can come up with one way that I’m pretty sure would work.
Create the slide with complete text, all in non-highlighted text. Duplicate the slide, and change the color of the first line you want to highlight. Duplicate again, change the first line back to normal and change the second line you want to highlight. The effect then becomes that when you click to the next slide you’re NOT changing the slide (which you are) but that you’re just changing the highlight (which, really, you aren’t.)
This makes for a multi-slide presentation, but it would work. We run PowerPoint on computers for church services, and as often as not, since the output runs through a video mixer before going to the screen, use this method rather than the animations, because the animations can be a bit jerky.
Hope that made sense. Again, I know this solution is “cheating” a little, since it doesn’t make use of any of the animations, but, hey, ya work with what ya got.
Yes, I guess that’s one way. It’d be very difficult to do last-minute modifications though. (I can’t help but do last-minute changes, as in when other speakers are doing their presentation) and it requires some editing before producing printouts. Any other way to do it, anyone?
In the edit screen, right click on the text box you want to have that effect in. Pick the “custom animation” menu. From there, pick the “effects” tab. Down the bottom of that window, there is a pull-down menu called “after animation.” The default (for me) is "Don’t dim. You can scroll through that menu to make text change color after you’ve clicked through it. At least thats what I think you’re asking…
Lots of ways to do this. For the chart effect in the OP I create a box with appropriate color and no line and put it “underneath” the chart text. You make a box for each chart cell and use custom animation to have the boxes appear and disappear in the right order.
For text bullets you can do the same. You can also animate the text, but the paragraphs/bullets appear one by one. You can use the dim feature to set the color of the old bullet after the next bullet appears.
Animation is really fun, especially if you add sound.
I’m not too familiar with any of these programs, but is it possible that this presentation you saw was not, in fact, PowerPoint? For all I know, maybe Corel Presentations, say, has this as a standard feature.
