How To Control When Elements Appear In PowerPoint 2000/2003

Consider the situation where you are making a presentation on the computer programming process. You have a slide with the following text:

Solving a problem on a computer involves the following activities

(1) Define the problem.

(2) Analyze the problem.

(3) Develop an algorithm for solving the problem.

(4) Write the computer program which implements the algorithm.

(5) Test and debug the program.

(6) Document the program.

(7) Maintain the program.

However, you don’t want all seven items to appear immediately. You want them to appear one at a time, after you have finished discussing the previous one. So, when the slide comes up, the only thing you want to see is

Solving a problem on a computer involves the following activities

Then, when you click the mouse, the first activity should appear. Your slide should look like this:

Solving a problem on a computer involves the following activities

(1) Define the problem.

After you’ve discussed the first point, you want to click and have the second activity appear, thus:

Solving a problem on a computer involves the following activities

(1) Define the problem.

(2) Analyze the problem.

After discussing the second activity, you click and the third appears. This process continues until all the activities are discussed.

Using the Text Box drawing tool, create eight text boxes. In the first one, type:

Solving a problem on a computer involves the following activities

In the second, type:

(1) Define the problem.

In the third, type:

(2) Analyze the problem.

and so on until all seven activities have been typed.

Your slide should look as follows:

(To see a larger view of any image, click on the image.)

If you view the presentation, everything will appear on the screen when the slide comes up.

Right-click on the text box with (1) and choose Custom Animation... (or go to Slide Show > Custom Animation...) The Custom Animation window appears on the right of your screen.

With text box (1) selected, click in the Add Effect box and choose Entrance > Appear (or any of the ‘effects’ that you like). If you don’t see your favorite effect listed, choose More Effects... and you will be presented with a wider choice.Next, click in the box next to Start and select On Click (if it is not already selected). This ensures that the text box (1) will appear when you click the mouse.

Repeat the above process for the other six activities. When you are done, the Custom Animation window should look like this:

To test what you’ve done, click on Slide Show in the Custom Animation window or press F5. The slide should come up with none of the activities showing. When you click, the first should appear. If you click again, the second should appear, and so on. If that does not happen, you’ve made an error. Go over the steps above but be a little more careful this time!

In the above, we showed how to get a text box to appear “On Click”. The same procedure applies to other kinds of elements such as photos, clip art or other draw shapes. The order in which they appear is the order in which you put them in the Custom Animation window. If needed, you can move elements up or down in the window by clicking on them and dragging.

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