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.
Note: To work with the Trigger animations, you should have at least two slide objects (shapes,
pictures, text boxes etc.) on the slide: one to animate, and the other to trigger the animation on the first object.
Yes, it may be possible to cause a Trigger animation with just one slide object but that has its own set of limitations. Also, that's a concept that's outside the scope of this tutorial.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- Save your presentation often.
See Also:
Trigger Animations in
PowerPoint 2013 for Windows
Trigger Animations in
PowerPoint 2010 for Windows