A2. Animations in PowerPoint

At the heart of PowerPoint’s phenomenal ability for making eye-popping social media video is Animations.

As Microsoft puts it here –

Animation can help make a PowerPoint presentation more dynamic and help make information more memorable.

The same post also says that presentation experts recommend using animations and sound effects sparingly.

Why..?

Well, according to Microsoft, too much of animation can be distracting … and take the focus away from what the speaker is saying.

While that surely is true for presentations, the irony is, when the users read the refrain above they stop using animation … even in video.

And that – shall we say – is like missing a goldmine!

The truth is, you can create magic with PowerPoint animations for making social media video. And so, go ahead, explore using both Animation and Transition to make your videos.

Remember, you can combine 2 or more different animations at the same time for the same object in PowerPoint.

Do this cleverly, and in no time you can create eye-popping social media video using PowerPoint animation.

Check out Microsoft’s instructions on creating animations in PowerPoint.

4 types of animation

PowerPoint offers 4 different types of animations. They are:

1. Entrance
2. Emphasis
3. Exit
4. Motion Paths

If you wish to check this out, select an object on a slide. Then click Animations on top menubar, and proceed to click on the dropdown arrow.

You’ll see the following on your screen.

Each of the 4 animations further has lots of variations. For example, Entrance has 80 different variations, no less.

If you think that’s all there is to PowerPoint animations … well … WAIT!

Many animations have what PowerPoint calls Effect Options.

With Effect Options, a particular animation can have something called Enhancements … like animating texts by setting delay between texts or letters.

Sounds confusing?

Watch the following GIF.

Example of animated PowerPoint GIF

The sequence of 4 animations in the above GIF is as under:

1. Entrance → Zoom — The word ONE is zooming in
2. Emphasis → Teeter — The word is now teetering side to side as it goes up
3. Motion Path → Up — The word moves up
4. Exit → Fade — Finally, the word fades out

As you can see, all the 4 animations are of different types.

You can of course combine multiple Entrance animations, or even multiple Emphasis animations, or anything. But it has to make sense.

Note another point in the above GIF animation.

In the 3rd animation, when the word ONE moves up, there is some lag between the 3 letters. This is done by using Enhancement with 10% delay between letters.

By now, you should be convinced that PowerPoint allows you to do almost endless types of animations.

And that – you’ll pleasantly discover – IS the real power of PowerPoint.

To explore the above animation, download for free the PowerPoint template here.

—

Also read:

• Transitions in PowerPoint
• Using PowerPoint stocks
• Producing video and/or GIF