PowerPoint's animation options allow users to create a plethora of movement effects, all the way from the amazing to
the dizzying. However, most of these animation effects have
events associated with
them. The three main events are On Click, With Previous, and After Previous.
Whichever event you use, PowerPoint offers an extra animation option called Triggers. This causes your animated objects to
swing into movement when you click an entirely different object on your slide. So you cause a click on one object to trigger
an animation of another slide 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.
Also, you can you Trigger animations to cause media events as well, such as playing a sound or video clip.
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.
Follow these steps to learn how to use Trigger animations in
PowerPoint 2010:
- Create a new presentation, or open an existing presentation.
Insert a new slide, and preferably
change the Slide Layout of this slide to
Blank or Title Only. Now go ahead and add any two slide objects. For this tutorial, we
inserted one picture and one
text box (typed 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 animate and show up when the picture is clicked. To do that, select the text box and
apply an Entrance animation
to it. You will see an animation tag named 1 appears (highlighted in red
in Figure 2), indicating that the text box is the first (and as of now, only) animated object on this slide.
Figure 2: Animation applied to the text box
- Now, access the Animations tab of the
Ribbon, and click the Animation Pane button, as shown highlighted in red within
Figure 3. Remember that this is a toggle button. So, if your Animation Pane is already
visible, then clicking this button will make the pane disappear.
Figure 3: Animation Pane button within Animations tab
- You should now see the Animation Pane, as shown in Figure 4. In this pane, you will
see a list of animations applied to objects on the slide. Right-click the animation which you want to be triggered from
another slide object. Then, from the resultant menu, chose the Timing option, as shown in
Figure 4.
Figure 4: Timing option selected for the animation
- This brings up a dialog box with Timing tab active, 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
Note: In Figure 5 above, you can see that the dialog box is named Wipe. The name of this dialog box differs based upon the type of animation applied. In this case, we had applied a
Wipe animation, hence the name. If you had a Fade animation applied, the dialog box
would read Fade rather than Wipe. 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 (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 to apply the effect and get back to the slide. You can see that we have
selected Picture 3 as the object that triggers the animation of the text box (refer to
Figure 6 again).
Figure 6: Trigger options
Tip: If you have many slide objects, then you may get confused with the names that PowerPoint uses to describe
them. For example you may have several pictures with names such as Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3, etc. To ascertain the name
of the slide object you want to use to cause a Trigger, you should summon the
Selection and Visibility Task
Pane that lets you find the name of a slide object, and also rename it if required. For more information, see our
Select, Deselect, View, and Hide
Shapes Using the Selection and Visibility Task Pane tutorial.
- This changes the animation tag of the text box to a Trigger animation (highlighted in red in
Figure 7; do compare with the tag in Figure 2).
Figure 7: Animation tag changed to indicate the Trigger
- Play the animation to see the trigger effect. The text box won't be visible at first. You will 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 the
Underline effect) 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
2007 for Windows