Bulleted Text Animation

This feature is only available in PPT 2002 (aka PPT XP) and 2003

You want to apply individual animation to bullets in a placeholder. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Step 1: Right-click an object on your slide and choose Custom Animation. The animation task pane will appear. 

You can also go to View/Task Pane, and the Task Pane will appear. It probably won't show up with the Custom Animation features, though. To get to those via the Task Pane itself, click the arrow beside the Task Pane Title at the top and choose Custom Animation from the list. 

Step 2: With the text placeholder selected on the slide, click on Add Effect in the Custom Animation Task Pane. Choose the effect you want to add. (I've used Fly In in this example.)

Step 3: Click the downward-pointing arrow next to the object in the task pane and select "Effect Options." 

On the Effect tab, your choices will depend on the animation effect you have chosen. You can set the direction the text will animate, you can add sound, you can change color after the animation, and you can specify that text come in by word, by letter, or all at once.

Step 4: On the Timing tab of the "Effect Options" dialog, you can specify that the animation begin on mouseclick, with previous [animation], or after previous [animation]. 

You can set the speed here by choosing an existing time or by typing in your own. (Don't worry about adding "seconds." PPT will read whatever number you type in here as seconds automatically.) 

You can also specify delays and repeats here.

Note that this is also where you set Triggers. In the image above, I've set the trigger so that the bulleted text will begin animating when the presenter clicks on the title text on the slide.

Finally, you can also get to this Timing tab directly from the task pane. Step 3 above shows how. (Note that "Timing" is on the list right under "Effect Options."

Step 5: On the Text Animation tab of the "Effect Options" dialog, you can specify that the various bulleted text levels come in together, one section at a time, individually, whatever. 

It's probably easier for you to simply experiment to see the difference between "by 1st level paragraphs," "by 2nd level paragraphs," etc., than it is for me to explain here.

This tab also allows you to set the text to come in "automatically after XX seconds," and if the text is in an autoshape, it will let you determine if the shape itself should animate as well. You can also specify to animate the bullets in reverse order.

Step 6: Note that you can set many of these things in the taskpane itself. That's often much less time consuming than choosing the various options tabs. 

Start animation on mouseclick, with previous [animation], or after previous [animation].

Specify the direction of the animation. These options may change depending on the animation effect you've chosen. 

Choose how much time the animation will take. You cannot type your own time in this box as you can in the Timing tab of the Effect Options dialog box, though. (See step 4.) 

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Now for the fun stuff--making each of the bullets do something different.

Individual Bulleted Text Animation

Now that you've added animation to all the bulleted text in a placeholder, it's easy to modify the settings on the individual "paragraphs" of bulleted text.

Do this via the Custom Animation Task Pane by "expanding contents."

Step 1: Click the downward-pointing double-arrow in the Custom Animation Task Pane. If you hover your mouse over it, you'll see the tooltip which says, "Click to expand contents." 

Depending on the text on your slide and the settings you've already selected in the various tabs of the Effect Options dialog box, you'll see something like the image directly below.

Step 2: You can actually tell quite a bit just from the list in the Task Pane shown directly above.

The mouse icons mean that those bullets will come in on mouseclick. You can see that the three primary bullets above are set to come in on mouseclick.

The various secondary bullets don't have a mouse symbol. If you click on one of those secondary bullets in the Task Pane, you can see that they've automatically been assigned the "With Previous" start. 

This is because I chose to use "by 1st level paragraphs" when I first set up the animation. (See the information on the Text Animation tab in step 5 above.) Had I chosen to use "by 2nd level paragraphs" there, even the secondary bullets would have been already designated to begin on mouseclick.

Step 3: Modify any of the settings for one of those individual bulleted levels by selecting the bullet in the Task Pane and changing the various settings available. 

Note that the "Add Effect" button becomes a "Change" button, which lets you know you're on the right track. Use this to change, for instance, the entrance effect from Fly In to oh, say, Dissolve.

Step 4: You can still go to the Effect Options dialog box to make more specific settings available to the individual bulleted text. Simply click on the arrow to the right of the individual bullet point and change options as described in the instructions above. 

To remove an animation from one of the bullets, make sure it's selected in the Task Pane, click on the arrow beside the animation in the task pane list, and choose Remove.

Don't forget, though, that, depending on the way your bulleted list is set up, you may also need to remove animation from bullets below or above the one you've selected. 

If you want to remove the animation from ALL (or SOME) of the bullets, either hold down your SHIFT or CTRL buttons and select the bullets in the task pane while they're expanded 

OR collapse the list. (When you hover your mouse over the upward-pointing double-arrow, you'll see "Click to hide contents" in the tooltip. Clicking that collapses the list.) 

Then when you select the Primary bullet in the Task Pane, all the bullets in that placeholder will be selected.

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