Deep Dive: Add LIFE to PowerPoint - Do You Know All 5 MOTION Tools?

I hate to admit, even with the most compelling storyline or enthralling narration in your PowerPoint Presentation, if the slides are static, you may lose interest from your audience. MOTION ADDS LIFE TO YOUR PRESENTATION.

Hi, I’m Les from Power Up Training, where my decades of experience become your expertise for free.

There is something about the human brain that is entertained by moving objects. We are like cats and laser pointers.  Make it MOVE!

PowerPoint knows that human nature rules and provides you with five tools to add motion to your slide deck.  Do you know all five techniques?

There are tools to add basic bullet animation plus special custom path motion animation within a slide.

And there are other tools that let you add visual movement for classic transitions between slides in the conference room or virtual conferencing presentations.

And more recently there are the PowerPoint animation tools to create non-linear interactive slide zoom shows and finally the amazing MORPH transition tool that is typically misunderstood.

Here at Power Up Training, we have created eleven different free YouTube tutorials on the basics of these five tools, plus some advanced creative uses of these techniques.

But our viewers want to know, which motion command should they use and when?

So this tutorial will provide a look at eye-opening uses of these five motion tools including when and where to effectively pull these out of your PowerPoint bag of tricks. (And no, you don’t need the 27 separate animations I made just for this one slide.)

So let’s Power UP and go learn about adding life with the five motion tools in PowerPoint!

PowerPoint gives you options to add life to your presentation with motion, but which tool should you use?

Let’s fly through all the choices to help you keep track of which tool does what and when to apply each motion tool to your invidivudal slides or whole presentation.

PowerPoint has five separate motion tools spread across the menus and each has a specific need. Some will focus on adding life to a single slide, while others between slides and then there are more recent magical tools

The Single slide tools are centered around the ANIMATION MENU tool and is self-contained within a single slide.

While the TRANSITION MENU tool and separate Slide Zoom tool will anaimate between slides.

And lastly there is the Morph Transition that would appear to be just between slides, but it can provide fabulous magic giving amazing life, to what appears to be a single slide.

Noteh that Slide Zoom and the Morph tools work only in the more recent versions of PowerPoint

Let’s do some housekeeping before we dive in.

Adding motion to PowerPoint goes back to almost the beginning to at least PowerPoint 2003.

Over the years, the features have merged to be on par between Windows and the Apple desktop platform.

New tools have been added, with some of the totally cool special effects in PowerPoint 2019 up to the present Office 365.

This presentation was completely created in PowerPoint 365 and if you want to disect how some of the motion tools were employed, including notes of the slide construciton, stay to the end. on how to download.

Also, note that I have added some extra highlighinty with the screen recoring tool of Camtasia with lower-third titles and other popups, where I will use RED outlines to indicate the use of Camtasia.

Finally look for the rippling on the screen and hear a mouse click, to know that I am advancing the slideshow.

The first two tools are centered around bring life to a slide. The long standing Object or Bullet Aninmation tool and the added cousin tool called Animated Motion Path.

Adding animation to a slide is a foundation motion tool that has been in PowerPoint for ever.

It is the simple hiding item on the slide page until you click to reveal. Thereby focusing your audience attention to specific parts of the slide.

And with each click, the next item will appear, hopefully in sync with your presentation topic.

If you elect to introduct each bullet point line, one at a time, you do need to practice to keep everything in sycn. It is embarrasing to be talking and not have the bullet point item revealed to your audience.

Most people are familar with the standard entract animation, such as here with the ZOOM effect.

But you can stack them together, such as an entrance animation and then with a second click, you can add emphasis such as the SPIN motion, which in a professional presentation is a bit over the top but that are many other EMPHASIS anilmations.

Lastly there is the EXIT animation, which may not be a full exit, as you see here, the action is to just change the font color to indicated that the topic has been covered.

But if you want after doing an entrance animation, you can add a second EXIT that will have it leave the slide.

All of our examples have been text and bullet point samples but you can apply on slide animation to not just text but to much more.

In fact for text alone, there are options to have the complete text box become animated, or just lines of text as I have been demonstrated, but you can even animate one word at a time or even one character at a time.

And if it is selectedable on the slide page, you can add animatino for entrance, emphasis and exit to all objects.

the more recent versions of PowerPoint has become quite sophisticared when animation COMPLEX items, like this SMARTART OBJECT, or even this GRAPH where you can stage the reveal of indidviaul data sets as you present.

SLide object aninmation is standard PowerPoint tool for a reason: it is simple to apply but still provide advanced options to ehance your slide decks.

Animated Motions was added to the toolbox with PowerPoint 2013

You can control text objects . . . watch how the MOVE ME text placeholder is moved to the bottom of the slide.

Or any selectable object on the slide page, like the red arrow shape, which will travel to the far side of the page.

If you can click it, you can move it to anywhere on the page, like this graph.

Do note that is only within the slide that the motion can happen, but you can set a motion to go off stage, which is outside the viewable boundary of the slide.

You can even add multiple timings to do some wild movements, such as with this bumble bee entering the slide than folloowing a zany motion path, before exiting the slide completely.

The two tools of animation and animation motion path covers what can be done inside a single slide, so lets go on to the next category of add life between slide transitions in a slide show, where we will find two more tools.

The Slide Transiition tool has been another foundational tool built into PoewrPoint from the beginning. It is the number of choices and visual sophistication that improves with each new version of PowerPoint.

The concept is to remove the sudden jolt of moving from slide to slide by substituting eitehr a sublte slide change or more showy special effect as you progress through your slide show on the screen.

It is simple to apply, just choose and click to apply a style.

But it is also easy to go overboard to turn a classy presentation into a cartoon looking show like this paper airplane transition.

As we discuss in some of design tutorials, it is best to stay consistent, as the transiton should now be the star of the show, but you can use it to get the attention of your audience if you are bringing in a new concept, such as this honeycomb transition.

And for complex slide shows, you can add automation to advance your presntation from slide to slide on a timed event show.

It is worth exploring all your choices to know what is in your slide transition kit of tools, but if you want, here is our jump start of my 10 favorite transitons tutoral listed above.

A more complex tool for moving between slides, is the SLIDE ZOOM TOOL available in Office 2019 up to the latest Office 365 desktop program.

It should not be confused with the animation zoom effect or the actual slide transiton called ZOOM. but it is a power=ful extra tool found on the INSERT RIBBON MENU.

And actually it is three tools in one.

Option 1 is SLIDE ZOOM and Option 2 is SUMMARY ZOOM and the third is SECTION ZOOM>

This slide is made up of three SLIDE ZOOM thumbnails, which when I click SLIDE ZOOM, it will jump to that slide.

And it was as easy to create as to just drag a thumbnail slide in the normal view onto my canvas and then position and size. The thumbnail is live, meaning if I change the slide cotnent, the thumbnail will auto update. And when I am done with the slide, a click returns me BACK to the original summary page. No hyperlink codeing required.

The second iteration is a bit more sophisticated for a larger slide show. In the creation process, once the SUMMARY ZOOM command is issued, up will pop a preview of all the slides, where you then click on the key “chapter slides” and PowerPoint will create a single new slide with each thumbnail. And when you are done with the slides in the collection, it will return you back to the main summary slide.

This has the added benefit of letting you create an interactive presentation as you can jump to slides out of the normla serial progression, as I can jump to he whale slide again by just clicking and then returning and then electing to go to any other slide next, such as the #3 SECTION ZOOM.

Section Zoom is really just a variation of the SUMMARY ZOOM, but built for slide shows that have already implmented sections.

Sections are ways to organize large collections of slides (see our special tutorial listed above) and can be seen in the slide sorter view here.

The SUMMARY ZOOM will then let you link a master chapter slide that when created, brings the first slide from each section together as a hyper linked table of contents.

And now any thumbnail can be clicked to jump to that collection of section slides, and when reaching the section last slide, the show will return back to the SUMMARY ZOOM SLIDE.

This is fantastic for group presentations with multiple presenters.

So far, we have covered four tools, each with many variations on how to apply motion to your presenation. Two tool for specific slide animation and two more tools for add motion in between slides during the slide show.

But now, I want to intro the most underutilized tool that can work both as an inside a slide tool and a motion between slide tool.

The MORPH TRANSITION tool is languishing in the SLIDE TRANSTION collection of dozeens of tools, but can act like a standalone mulitfunction tool.

At a high level, MORPH TRANSTION looks at two slides and decides which items are the same on both slides and how they may change from one to the next.

Examine these two slides. The left slide has a brown box on the left edge, while the right slide has a blue box on the right edge. So the Morph tool will “motion” the box accross as we change slides and also change the color from brown to blue in a fade to blue transition fasihon.

So here is the slide and watch the brown box slide over and morph to blue on the second slide.

In fact, Morph Transiont was instructed to look for matching words and move them also.

I will go back a slide but watch how the word THE, TOOLS, MICROSOFT all travel from one side to the next as those three words exists on both slides.

The cool effect is easy to put together, much less time than using the MOTION PATH TOOL.

Let’s look closer at how you can create a dramatic page intro.

To create motion actions from one slide to the next takes a little staging. On the first slide, our slide canvas has a simple black and gray background., but outside the slide canvas view area, I have placed three objects that won’t be visible on this page, but we will put them on the second slide page in three locations and so the image, the title and the subtitle will slide into place.

Here is the first background slide, and with the next slide, the object and titles glide in as if this is still the same slide.

Yes, morph transition is a slide transiton, but your viewer does not have to know the magic on how you are achieving these cinematic effects.

Watch how we bring these separate slides into a movie like sequence.

With each click of the mouse, I am able to focus on a specific point in time for my project time line.. What is happening behind the scense is just three box moving positonis from one slide to the next.

So we have covered the five tools: motion inside a slide, motion between slides in a slide show plus the super magical MORP TRANSITON.

So when do I use each tool? And how do I learn to use it?

Power Up Training has five free youtube tutorials for:

I need to add some small motion on a single slide to focus my audience to a specific point. Then use BULLET & OBJECT ANIMATION”

I want a topic or an to object to be EMPHAISZED so tthat my audience does not miss the point. Then use either aniamation with the stack actions or give it a boost with the Motion Path Aninmation Tool

I need to add a flow to my whole presenation from slide to slide, with some extra punch for star slides. The the solution is one of the many SLIDE TRANSITION special effects.

I want a amazing moving of individual object from one slide to the next, to bring coolnes and continutuity. Then work with the MORP TRANSITION tool.

And for WOW, then creatively use the MROPH transiton with advanced motion management capablities .

Or for interactive presenations as we have been witnessing on this zoom created slide, use the zoom tool to break out of the normal linear powerpoint slide show.

To master these tools, you may need more than just one set of YouTube tutorials that I’ve been listing.

These tools are so amazing and diverse, that we at Power Up Training, have created eleven different videos to help you look like a PowerPoint Presentation Wizard. Find all of them on our Youtube Channel or in the listed playlist above.

And if you want to peek inside to see how this presentation was created, I have posted the full PowerPoint file on our website for you to take apart and learn.

Inside, you will find that the notes portion of the slides provide a bit more details on how I constructed the show, page by page.