I am bringing a text placeholder onto a slide one bullet point at a time. However, my slides are pictures so I need to fill the text placeholder background with white fill. Is there a way to bring in the fill color with the bullet points so the audience sees only the unobstructed picture first then the text and white fill background for the text in the placeholder as I bring it in?

1. Create a new text box for every bullet you require. Make sure your text boxes have white fills and black text as you need. You might even want to experiment with the transparency of the fill if you are using PowerPoint 2002 and 2003 - you'll find all these options in the Format dialog box - to access this dialog box, just double-click the text box.

2. Then line up all the text boxes so that they appear to be a single text placeholder.

3. Animate each text box in succession so that the bullets build one after the other.

Sunday, June 19, 2005