DISCLAIMER:
My suggestions in these blogs will blow the traditional PowerPoint recommendations to smithereens. Will I violate the rules? You bet. They will be shredded, ground into pulp, and smashed into PowerPoint road kill. (Note: I apologize for the violence in this disclaimer. Sometimes I get carried away.) For example, I tried the recommended traditional, one color slide-same font approaches. Guess what? The slides were as boring as the content on them. (Sidebar: As a former freelance photographer, I learned early on that if a picture doesn’t elicit some feeling [positive or negative] by the viewer, then it should be discarded as ineffective.)
NEW RULE FOR POWERPOINT: That rule should apply to our PowerPoint slides. Our audience should be emotionally involved in our presentation. That begins with the slides. A spiritless, unemotional reaction to our slides is totally unacceptable. If my strategy is making you nervous or you already started throwing up in this 1st paragraph, you might want to get a vomit bag or close this blog.
BERK'S GOAL: To arm you with the tools to create break-the-mold presentations, not create a moldy audience as they drift into a coma.
BERK'S AUDIENCE ASSUMPTIONS: I assume every audience to whom I present has better things to do with its valuable time than attend my session. The cynics and know-it-alls are thinking: “Tell me something I DON’T already know.” The students probably have the attention span of goat cheese and mentally operate at “twitch speed.”
THE CHALLENGE: Open the presentation with a bang and sustain that bang or you’ll lose them. It’s opening night on Broadway!
8. LETTER AND WORD MOVEMENT
Once your slide has landed from the transition above, below, sideways, diagonally, etc., the next step is to pump some life into the dead words. Custom Animation is the REEEAAL PowerPoint defibrillator.
a. Click Slide Show dropdown on top of screen.
b. Click Custom Animation.
c. With your slide in “normal view,” click the slide and your ready to go. The title and content are already typed on the slide.
d. In the right margin, Slide Effect will appear.
e. Be super-careful now. Once you click Slide Effect, you will enter a whole new world.
YIIIKES!! There it is: a dropdown with Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Paths. The animation can be used with opening and closing slides, titles, bullet or numbered lists, and jokes. This blog will address the 1st two applications, the next blog will cover the last 2.
OPENING or CLOSING SLIDE: Many of you have seen my Star Wars parody opening to one of my presentations. It’s all animation in the words already on the slides (except for my light saber dual, which is Ron animated). There is movement from the 1st slide onward. The most dramatic is the scrolling up of the script into outer space, just like the movie opening. “How do you do that?” Piece of animation, my friends.
a. Click Entrance
b. Click More Effects at bottom of list
c. Notice categories of Basic, Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting (By now, you probably guessed that I live in “Exciting World.”)
d. Under Exciting World” click Credits—your words should immediately start moving up the page; it’s like the end credits of a TV program or movie
Ah ha! Mystery solved. You now know how to create the Star Wars scroll. Sounds like a dance. You can also use the Credits animation at the end of your presentation. I did that with all of the credit lines for the music in my presentation, but I was always cut off by the next presenter, director of the conference, or audience questions. I gave up on the closing credits. At least, we both know how to do it if the opportunity arises.
TITLE ON SLIDE: After your “blank” slide enters the screen with a transition, the next step is to add the title with movement. My section slides contain only the title for each section of content, such as Research on Humor & Laughter. Most all of the other slides have a title at the top and content below.
You can see the wide range of Entrance options. I recommend trying them all to see which ones you like. The Preview box below allows you to keep playing with them indefinitely. Some of my FAVES are: fly in, faded zoom, zoom, color typewriter, magnify, swivel, light speed, pinwheel, and whip. You can set the speed for all of these entrances and, for some, the direction, like fly in. The speed adjustment allows you to precisely time the title entrance with a music clip.
Hope you’re getting some new ideas from these blogs. We’ll continue this topic in my next blog with adding animation to bullet or number lists and, you shouldn’t be surprised, jokes in multiple-choice or top 10 format. Stick around for more fun and, just maybe, a little dab of information thrown in hither and yon, to and fro, and click and clack.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
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