Adding Animation in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

We have already explored what animation is, and what are the guidelines to be considered before you add an animation to a slide object within PowerPoint. You can animate any slide object that is selectable on your slide -- these slide objects include pictures, shapes, text, bulleted lists, SmartArt graphics, charts, etc. Once the slide object is animated, you can tweak the animation to control how the slide object appears, moves, and disappears in the Slide Show view. Before you tweak, you must first add an animation to the slide object, as explained in the following steps:

Open a new presentation in PowerPoint 2011, insert a shape and select it. Or open any existing presentation you have, and select an unanimated slide object to which you want to add animation -- Figure 1 below shows a Star shape selected. With the shape selected, click the Animations tab of the Ribbon (highlighted in red within Figure 1).

Figure 1: Animations tab of the Ribbon
Within the Animations tab, locate the Entrance Effects group and hover your cursor over the preview thumbnails to reveal a down-arrow (More) button, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 2.

Figure 2: More button within the Entrance Effects group
Click this More button to open the Entrance Effects drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 3. Within the Entrance Effects drop-down gallery, you will see various Entrance Effect animation preview thumbnails, grouped into four different categories named Basic, Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting. Just click on any one thumbnail to apply the associated animation to your selected slide object. In Figure 3, you can see that we have selected the Zoom entrance animation within the Moderate category.

Figure 3: Entrance Effects drop-down gallery
As soon as the selected animation effect has been applied to the slide object, you can see a digit (for example the digit 1, highlighted in red within Figure 4) along with the selected slide object, indicating that an animation has been applied to it. In Figure 4, since you see only 1 without any 2, 3, etc., you can assume that this slide requires you to click just once while in Slide Show mode to see all animations on the slide. By default, all animations applied are set to play on click.

Figure 4: Animation applied to the slide object
Once you are done with applying an animation, you can preview it by clicking the Play button within the Preview group of Animations tab that you can see in Figure 5. You can also play the slide in Slide Show view to preview the animation.

Figure 5: Play button used to preview the animation
You can add animation effects other than Entrance in the same way. Just choose the relevant animation effects for Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Path animations.

Note: If you want to add more than one animation effect to the same slide object, then go ahead and add the first animation. Thereafter, carefully select only the slide object (not the digit representing the animation applied e arlier), and follow the steps 1 to 3 explained earlier to add another animation. This time, you may see the digit 2 in addition to the digit 1, which indicates that all animations on the slide will require two clicks to animate. You can similarly add more than two animations to the same slide object.

Tip: If your slide has more than one slide object, you can also add animation effects for all of them using the same process. Remember that any animation added first will play first, and any animations added thereafter will play in the same sequence as you added them. Yes, you can change this sequence by using the re-ordering options for animations.

Now that you have added an animation to a slide object, you can control more animation properties like event and speed.