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To the Point Christopher B. Contois 2cinteractive.com

PowerPoint's Animation Options (PowerPoint 2000)

PowerPoint has several options for animating text, images, and transitions. However, one must first ask him or herself: Why use animation? Is it because everyone else is taking advantage of it? Is it because I like the effect? Or, am I not even sure why I have added it to my presentations?

If you are using animation because it appears that other designers are, or if you are unsure about its proper usage, stop animating now, because you are most likely watering down the message you are trying to get across. If you can say that you use animation in order to reinforce your message or to focus the observer's eyes on a particular area of discussion, then you would be utilizing animation for the right reasons. As mentioned earlier, there are several options for animating with PowerPoint. They include:

- PowerPoint's custom animation engine
- PowerPoint's slidetransitions
-3rd party applications
-The insertion of movies and animated gifs
-The use of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
-The launching of external applications

PowerPoint's Custom Animation Engine
PowerPoint's custom animation engine has a variety of effects: wipes, fly-ins, and zooms, just to name a few. The complexity of these effects are very limited. Only one effect can occur at a time, and PowerPoint does not offer exiting effects (except to disappear, or change color). Therefore, once an object is on the stage it cannot be removed and multi-animation sequences cannot occur simultaneously. Additionally, because PowerPoint is the most popular presentation package available, the effects have the disadvantage of appearing over-used and unoriginal. Personally, the only effect I work with is the "wipe effect" for both transitions and animations.

3rd Party Animations
There are several companies that are trying to increase the animation library offered within PowerPoint. Although these effects are amazing when working, I have found their performance to be unstable and unreliable.

Insertion of Movies
The ability to insert a Movie into PowerPoint has been around for several years. This happens to be a very stable option. However, there are 3 main things to be aware of:

- Movies need to play in a box, therefore they will not   look integrated into your presentation
-Movies cannot be embedded, and absolute paths   are sometimes required
-Movie files can easily be greater than 10 megs. (i.e.   not very emailable)

Animated Gifs
The ability to insert an animated gif is PowerPoint's latest advance. An animated gif is a file that has a series of gif images that play in a timed sequence. Gif files can only contain 256 colors, therefore, they cannot be blended into places that exceed this limitation.

Animated gifs are inserted and act like images, which are embedded within PowerPoint. Although animated gifs can play full screens, most system processors cannot handle them. Therefore, these animations must remain small in file and dimension size.

VBA (Visual Basic For Applications) And Macromedia Flash
Flash is the most popular animation package for the web. The files are small and the animations are very dynamic. Flash can be inserted into PowerPoint via PowerPoint's VBA add-on. The insertion of Flash into PowerPoint has been around since PowerPoint 97, so why are so few people using it? There are several reasons, the most important being that VBA, Flash and PowerPoint are not 100% guaranteed to always run.

The Launching of External Applications to Run the Animation
Flash, Director, and other software packages, can run animation. This is best used during large, formal audience presentations where the files can be pre-set to run seamlessly. However, the complications here are quite similar to movie insertions. Files must be associated and are typically too large for email.

What are other options? If you feel that animation is the answer to enhanced clarity, and the options above are unable to fulfill your needs, then your presentation can be built completely with Flash or Director. However, this requires an experienced interactive developer to build and edit your presentation.

There is another solution: Astound. This program has been around for almost as long as PowerPoint but because of a shaky beginning and limited marketing, it is not widely known of. Astound is very similar to PowerPoint- slides can be edited, images, movies and sounds can be inserted, transitions can be added, and so much more. Initial testing showed that it offered all of the most common features of PowerPoint but with an increased animation library, a more sophisticated sequences, more transitions, easy web transference and the capability of becoming an exe- thus decreasing the need for viewers to have the application. For more information on Astound, please visit their website at www.astound.com.

-Christopher
email: ccontois@2cinteractive.com
url: www.2cinteractive.com