So this one is about how the changes as software advances is not always better. I am working on a presentation I am giving on Tuesday evening. I am using Microsoft Power Point 2007 on my work Windows machine. I prefer when giving a presentation to not have all the text on the screen, people end up reading it and not paying attention to what I am saying. I figure if people just want to read the presentation, then why do I have to be there?
However I do not want any really advanced animation on most slides, just a simple appear animation. So that when I press the button, the next section of text appears. No fades, no wipes, no fly in, just simply appear. The options I have in Power Point 2007 under the animate drop down are:
- No Animation
- Fade
- All At Once
- By 1st Level Paragraph
- Wipe
- All At Once
- By 1st Level Paragraph
- Fly In
- All At Once
- By 1st Level Paragraph
- Custom
I looked in the help file to see how to define for reuse a custom animation. Nope not in there. Then I looked at how to record a Macro like one used to be able to do in Office 2003. Nope, that is not supported any more, I would have to write a Visual Basic script. So what I end up doing was the following, after exposing the Custom Animation panel:
- Selected the content box
- Selected Fade – By 1st Level Paragraph
- Mouse over to the Custom Animation panel
- Select all the lines of text in the panel
- Click the Change Effect button and select Appear
- If I wanted to remove the animation from the first item on the page (which I often did):
- Select the first item
- Click Remove
So as you can see, it was fairly manual and repetitive. I thought computers were supposed to make things easier and faster for just these type of tasks.
Don’t even get me started on trying to sequence 16 tables directly over one another and having to
individually set the entrance and exit animation for each one.