Trigger Animations in PowerPoint 2007 for Windows

When you are presenting, you may come across a scenario where you want to click on one slide object to animate some other object. Not only can you cause the click to trigger a typical animation of another slide object, but you can also trigger media events such as playing a sound or video clip. Not surprisingly, these types of animations are called Trigger animations. Since they trigger an action for some other object. Although you may have set your animations to any of the three events: On Click, With Previous, and After Previous. It really does not make a difference since once you add Triggers, all of these animations will behave almost as if they were On Click animations.

1. Create a new presentation, or open an existing presentation. Insert a new slide, and preferably change the slide layout of this slide to Blank. Now go ahead and add any two slide objects. For our tutorial example, we inserted one picture and one text box (type some text in the text box), as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Slide with a picture and a text box
2. We now aim to cause the text box to show up when the picture is clicked. This means that the slide will only contain the picture when it is played. A click on the picture will bring up the text box. To do that select the text box and apply an entry animation to it. You will see the animation tag called 1 appears (highlighted in red in Figure 2) indicating that the text box is the first (and only) animated object on this slide.
   
   
   Figure 2: Animation applied to the text box
3. Ensure that the Custom Animation Task Pane is visible. Since you added an entrance animation in the preceding step, it should be visible. Alternatively, access the Animations tab of the Ribbon, and click on the Custom Animation button, as shown in Figure 3. Remember that this is a toggle button. So, if your Custom Animation Task Pane is already visible, then clicking this button will make the Task Pane disappear.
   
   
   Figure 3: Custom Animation button within Animations group of the Animations tab
4. You should now see the Custom Animation Task Pane, as shown in Figure 4. In this Task Pane, you will see a list of animations applied to objects on the slide. Our example shows a solitary animation added to the text box, so we right-clicked the animation, and from the resultant menu, chose the Timing option, as shown in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Timing option for the animation selected
5. This brings up a dialog box with Timing options for the selected animation, as shown in Figure 5. To add a trigger to cause this animation, locate and click the Triggers button that you can see highlighted in red in Figure 5.
   
   
   Figure 5: Triggers button within the Timing tab of the Fade dialog box
   
   
   Note: In Figure 5 above, you can see that the dialog box is named Fade. The name of this dialog box differs based upon the type of animation applied. In this case, we had applied a Fade animation, hence the name. If you had a Wipe animation applied, the dialog box would read Wipe rather than Fade. In any case, the options within Triggers work the same way for any animation type.
6. Within the options that come up, select the Start effect on click of (highlighted in red in Figure 6) radio button. Thereafter, click the down-arrow besides (highlighted in blue in Figure 6) to bring up a list containing names of slide objects on the same slide (see Figure 6). Within this list, select the name of the object which you want to click to trigger the selected animation. Click OK button to apply the effect and get back to the slide. You can see that we have selected Picture 4 as the object that triggers the animation of the text box (see Figure 6).
   
   
   Figure 6: Start effect on click of option selected for the animation
7. This will change the animation tag of the text box to a trigger animation (highlighted in red in Figure 7. Compare with the tag in Figure 2) .
   
   
   Figure 7: Trigger tag displays for the animation
8. Play the animation to see the trigger effect. The text box won't be visible at first. You have to click the picture to trigger the animation for the text box (see Figure 8).
   
   
   Figure 8: Animation applied to the text box starts playing when the picture is clicked
   
   
   Note: You are not limited to an entrance animation to use triggers. You can also use emphasis, exit, and motion path animations, and have them all triggered by clicking another object. In Figure 9, below, you can see that we used the same picture and text box, but this time we triggered an emphasis animation (we used Brush on Underline) rather than an entrance animation.
   
   
   Figure 9: Emphasis animation applied to the text box starts playing when the picture is clicked.
9. Save your presentation often.

See Also:

Trigger Animations in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows
Trigger Animations in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows