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Powerful PowerPoint Presentations – Creating a series of click-activated instructions in PowerPoint

Recently, a colleague asked me for help in designing a PowerPoint presentation. He wanted to know if there was an easier way to accomplish his mission, which was to display a different question or instruction each time the user clicks the mouse.

His approach was to make five or six copies of the same slide and then edit the slides individually. I showed him a much faster and easier way to create a series of click-activated instructions—by creating a single slide that contains all of the instructions in a text box and then tweaking the timing and effects properties for that text box. Here’s the scoop.

Timing is everything

Suppose you’re designing a training slide show, and you want the student to read a question or an instruction, ponder it, and then click the mouse to display the answer to the question or the next instruction. And maybe, just for fun, you want to display a cool graphic image after the student clicks for the last time.

To illustrate how to create click-activated text, we’ll use the slide shown in the figure below. (We simply created a blank slide, added one text object for the title, another text object for the instructions, and an image object for the clip art.)

We’ll tell PowerPoint to display the items in the instructions text box one line at a time—adding a line each time the user clicks the mouse.

  1. Once you’ve typed the instructions in your text box, here’s how you make those instructions appear one click at a time.
  2. Right-click on the text box that contains the instructions and select the Custom Animation option from the Context menu, as shown below.
  3. When the Custom Animation dialog box appears, click the Timing tab.
  4. The item labeled “Text 2” will be selected by default. (That’s the second text object in our sample slide, the one that contains our instructions.) In the Start Animation section, click the Animate radio button. When you do, PowerPoint will move Text 2 to the top of the Animation Order list, as shown below.
  5. Next, click the Effects tab. At this point, select one of the options under the Entry Animation And Sound option. These options determine how the text will appear on the slide—you can select plain old Appear or any of the other animation options. Then, click the check box labeled Grouped By and select the 1st option, as shown below. That option says, “Bring in the text one first-level paragraph at a time.”
  6. In order to make the picture the last thing to appear on this slide, click the Timing tab again. Click on Object 3 and then click the Animate radio button. When you do, PowerPoint will add Object 3 to the Animation Order list. Click the Effects tab and choose an entry animation style for the graphic. (For our sample slide, we chose the option Fly From Left.)
  7. Click OK to close the Custom Animation dialog box.

Running the slide show

When you run this slide show, the first thing you’ll see is the title text box—the only object with which we didn’t associate any animation. When you click the mouse, you’ll see the first line of your instructions. Each time you click, the next text entry appears in order.

After you’ve clicked four times to display all four entries in the text box, the fifth mouse click displays the clip art image. In this example, our slide show only contains one slide. However, if your presentation contains more than one slide, the next click will simply display the next slide.