How to put some motion in your PowerPoint presentation

What is Animation in a PowerPoint presentation?

The term animation can be used in a number of ways in relation to your PowerPoint presentation:

• PowerPoint Animations: Using Power Point tools to set the the way items (text, bullets, images, etc.) move on a slide during a slide show
• Animated PowerPoint Backgrounds: a video or moving background that serves as the entire background of a slide in your presentation.
• Other animated media to insert in PowerPoint: Like inserting pictures in your slides, you can also insert a Flash animation or a moving piece of clip art (like an animated gif) in your presentation.

Using Animation tools in PowerPoint. PowerPoint animation tools give you the ability to move objects on a slide during a presentation. Let’s say that you have added a picture to one of your slides, but you want to talk about the image before displaying it to your audience.  You can simply select one of the many animation presets available in PowerPoint to do this.  For example, you might animate the picture by choosing Fade In to delay the appearance.

PowerPoint also includes tools you can use to design custom animations. These may be simple or quite complex.

Regardless of the method you choose, you can create an animation on a single slide or apply a specific animation to all slides using the slide master in PowerPoint.

Animated PowerPoint Backgrounds. Video backgrounds add drama and a professional flair to your presentations.  Download a free animated PowerPoint background from our new Video Backgrounds collection.

Video in PowerPoint can have titles and text on top. Just use one of the free tools - Windows MovieMaker or Apple’s iMovie - to make your own custom video background.

Follow the simple  instructions to put titles over the video in Windows and insert your animation into PowerPoint.

If you use a MAC for PowerPoint, check out iMovie from Apple. This is another free tool that allows you to insert animated PowerPoint backgrounds with titles. Lots of other Mac PowerPoint resources are here.
 

Adding Animation by adding inserting Flash animations to your presentation. 
To play an animated Flash file in your presentation, make certain that the Adobe Flash Player is installed on your computer, then follow these steps (in PowerPoint 2002 and 2003):

• Select the slide where you want to play the Flash animation.
• Choose View/Toolbars and then select Control Toolbox.
• In the Control Toolbox, click More Controls (the button with the hammer and wrench icon).
• Scroll down the list and click Shockwave Flash Object, then drag on the slide to draw the control.
  (You can resize or move the control later if you wish.)
• Right-click on the Shockwave Flash Object, and then click Properties.
• Using the Alphabetic tab, click the Movie property.
• In the blank cell next to Movie, type the full drive path including the file name (for example, C\:Present1\MyFlash.swf) of the Flash animation you want to play.
  Make sure the Playing property is set to True. This plays the file automatically when the slide is displayed.
  Modify the animation’s Loop property by clicking the cell to get a down arrow, click the arrow, and select True or False.

Samples of animated looping video backgrounds in Glow and Glimmer for PowerPoint.

Information on Other Presentation Products from PowerFinish:
What is a PowerPoint background?
What is a PowerPoint template and what does it include?
What is a Template Design Set?

Have you heard the news?

PowerPoint 2010 includes the option to put text over video!  Now it will be even easier to add motion to your presentations!

See our new Video Backgrounds for PowerPoint

Our FAQs show you how simple it is to add animated video backgrounds to your presentations.

Try a free sample of our new animated Video Backgrounds for PowerPoint.