* Using the Pseudo-Animations trick ("Disney Effect") *
Still talking about avoiding bad surprises when you run a presentation on a computer that is not the one you used to initially prepare or to rehearse the show, there's a nice design tecnique I would like to share with you.
Some features like animation effects of different elements of your slide (objects, images, text) can be easily set up in PowerPoint, and are used especially when you have for instance a bulleted list and you want to display the items one at a time.
If you use PowerPoint custom animations you might have compatibility problems when:
1) you run the show on a computer that has a previous version of PowerPoint installed;
2) you save the file as html for Web publishing (the browsers won't display those effects);
3) you save the file as PDF (see appropriate review), which won't keep the animations (unless you use the Actino software we introduced above in this issue);
4) you use a different PC from yours: hardware-related issues (example: graphic card and monitor refresh-rate settings, not enough RAM available, lower processor speed etc.) could avoid to properly display and show your custom animations for text or objects.
In order to avoid all these risks, why not rely on an old trick that most professionals use in their real presentations?
Here it is: Let's imagine we have a slide with a title and a bulleted list with 4 items that we want to show one at a time, so the audience will focus only on the displayed point not being distracted by reading the following topic.
We have two options: either we use the custom animations in PowerPoint, but we have just seen what are the disadvantages, or we use the "Disney effect" trick following these easy steps:
1) Create the slide with your title and all your 4 bullets already completed
2) Go to Slide Sorter View
3) Select that slide by clicking on it
4) Press Ctrl+D (for Duplicate) as many times as your bullets in the list are: in this case 4. We'll end having 5 exact slides with our bulleted list
5) Go to Slide View mode, and display the first slide of this series of 5
6) Leave the title on, and delete all the remaining bulleted points
7) Move to the second slide, leave title and first bulleted point, and erase all the others
8) Third slide: leave title and two bullets, remove the other two bullets and so on
You'll have at the end 5 slides with the same exact background, font style, colors etc. but with the difference of one bulleted point from one to the next.
Try to rehearse your show in Slide Show View without applying any transition effect between the slides and tell me if the effect is not the same you can get using the custom animations. Your animation effects have now the advantage of being displayable by a web browser, a PDF file, or by an older version of PowerPoint. Pretty smart, isn't it?
If you are persistent enough, by applying appropriate transitions between slides you'll obtain some of the same effects as the ones possible with the animations. Let's make an example: do you want a bulleted text line of your list appear from left to right? Apply between the two slides a transition called "Wipe Right". Do you want your bulleted text to be revealed from top to bottom? Apply to the slides a transition called "Wipe Down".
You can read this article in the original issue of MasterView.
