Cool Technique: Create 7 WOW Morph Projects

Welcome to the PowerPoint Morph Cookbook for professional designs.

This is Les from Power Up Training and my goal is to inspire you to use the fabulously flexible Morph slide Transtion tool found in PowerPoint 2019 up to the latest version of Office 365 for Windows and macOS.

I will take four themes, and we will disect how to create 7 different transitions for different purposes. In the end, your eyes should be opened to many more cool techniques that are not cheesy.

Each of our four themes will introduce different variations to suit your slide needs, such as for entrance and exits, we will build an example to add drama to a new slide or let you provide laser focus on specific points on your screen.

Because Morph transitions add motion between slides, it is a perfect tool to indicate change either between topics or represent elapsing of time.

And in a whole genre of its own, Morph lets you create unlimited creative designs to display one or many photographs and images.

Lastly, you can take your morph skill to create your own unique slide transition effects.

So let’s dive in.

Our first theme will be entrances and exits.

This is an advanced tutorial that builds on our earlier Morph Fundamentals YouTube tutorial. If you need to brush up on these skills, do use the link above.

Here are the elements to create a dramatic entrance. We need to understand that there is the main canvas, which is the display portion of the slide.

And there is also an off canvas section that is not diplayed but is used as an off stage, with elements just watiing to motion in onto the slide. The morph tool will take these outisde elements and motion them onto the stage as you morph transtion between slides.

Let’s go through the two slides to see the off-stage objects grow and enter onto the main slide stage.

Exiting out of the slide show, we see the two slides, but by defualt, you do not see much of the off stage area, so on the bottom right corner, we can shrink down the slide view through the zoom slider and see where our off stage elements are positioned.

Location matters. The main title PROJECT CONCLUSION is offstage top and to the right, so it sill float in from that direction. While the date subtitle will from below and just off a small amount to the right.

Our drawing plans are not only located to the left, but it is a smaller sized image, so it will grow into the 2nd slide bigger size.

Let’s check it out with the titles floating in from different directions the photo growing into place.

And as a bonus, the third slide has the photo spinning out and the two text titles shifting over while changing color, then the text also exits the stage.

For the 5th slide, a matching gray retangle shifts in.

So here is the slide where the plans photo exits out by ROTATATING and SHRINKING . . . both great effects. and see taht the TTILES have both moved to the lefts side of the slide with new text color.

Now to the sliding gray rectangle coving up the final slide. If I click on the preceeding slide. And zoom out the view, you see the large rectangle sitting offstage, just wating to glide onto the last slide by way of morph.

But watch how it is a bit clumbsy, and so the lesson is that morph is not always the right tool.

Instead, I will change the transition to FADE and watch how much more smooth the slide change looks.

Here is the next class project. Same theme of ENTRANCE & EXIT but instead of a creating a full slide drama, we will use Morph to bring a dart’s bullseye focus on a key element of our slide.

Lets watch first and then deconstruct. Here is our into slide, and we bring in the time line by way of a morph spin entrance, but it is the next slide where we focus in on the summer months worth of tasks with a morph zoom of the object on the slide . . .no off stage elements. And when done, we will do an offstage sping exit.

Once again, Morph transforms the locations between two slides, so we do need to have our timeline offstage, if we want it to spint into place.

The next pair of mortphs between slide 2 and 3 is a simple zoom, where we CROP the first image and enlarge to bring focus.

And the last pair of morphs is the exit as we spin the object out to off stage, but I have made the final resting location with a GIANT version as, I like the grow and exit look

Now that we know the set up, let’s see it again

And if you have not worked with cropping and sizing of images, check out of tutorial that goes even deeper into create spotlight emphasis with additonal cool tricks. See the YoutTube link above

Our next project changes theme to INDICATE CHANGE in our presentation.

In this example our slide show is switching from the desktop tools and the data center server tools. So we will use multple indicators for change, such as the text boxes on the left moving to the right and the color scheme of warm to the cooler blue palette.

Let see it first and then look at the construction.

Here is the first of two slides, moving from the topic of DESKTOP to the next topic of Data Center tools. While the layout is similar, the morph effect moves the main brown rectangle box across the screen while transforming the colors plus the extra nice touch of moving the common words from left to right.

Let me reverse this by hitting my back arrow and go forward again. Pay attention to the moving common words of THE TOOLS and the word MICROSOFT.

The morphing of the rectangle box location and color transformation is not a surprise, but let see how we caught the common words to move across.

In the TRANSTION Ribbon Menu, we see that MORPH is turned on, but take a look at our choices in MORPH OPTIONS>

Need to learn more about word and letter morphing, check out our YouTube turoial listed abov e.

Project #4. Morphing motion is an excellent tool to represent the passing of time.

While we could use a graphic like this to show time moving with an arrow, watch how the timeline comes alive with morphing of multiple motion slides.

Each of these are invidiaul static slides, but morph gives us the illusion of a slideing focus point gliding a cross our timeline with each click.

So how did we do this? THere are four elements on this slide: 1) the timeline grpahic, 2) our seethrough focus box with only an outline and no filll color and 3 and 4 are two seperate glass see through boxes with a light blue fill and the transparency set to 76% to give the glas lookgthrough look.

Now we just duplicate the full slide, with morph transiton turned on, and resize our three rectangular boxes to the focus part of our timeline. Do just resize and not move, as you risk getting the boxes out of alignment which will kill the illusion.

With that updated, lets run through the slide show again and you now know the magic look of the slide window is just three boxes that morph is transforming with each slide change.

One bonus tip for the first slide. It would seem that we do not need a transparent glass box on the left side, but if we don’t have that element there, it will not creat the sliding window effect. So that first box IS THERE. But it is just very, very thin.

On to our third theme of Photo Morphing,

This strategies has so many techniques but basically falls into two major variations: showcasing a single photo and presenting a collection.

The simplest presentattion trick is to use the zoom approach. Basically show a portion or all of the image and then either zoom in or out with the morph tool adding the cool transition between two slides.

Basically, you are either shinking or growing the size of the visible image between the two slides.

As you can see, my second slide has just a giant version of the photo stetching outside the visible canvas area, which won’t be displayed. It helps for it to be a high resolution photo.

For this particular effect, it may be zooming way to fast, and so you can go back into the TRANSITON menu, and with morph selected, change the duration of the transition.

Here I will go from 2 seconds to 5 to give it a smoother tranisition. Unfortunately, unlike other animation tools with finer motion controls, this is the only change you can make to the speed of the morph transition to slow it down for a smoother look.

Next, we will look at a close cousin technique that was popularized by the documentary maker Ken Burns, as we pan across an image in this next morph transition.

This one can be a bit more tricky as I have the enlarged photo covering the whole visible canvas area with the left edge on the first slide and the right edge on the second slide, but because it is covering the canvas, it is hard to see what is visible.

An alterntivae would be to crop the top and bottom for easier management, but that is not necessary. I am just showing here on the screen the oversized image. If you need to learn more about cropping and resizing, subscribe to our channel and look for this video.

And the next strategy is not focused on just one photo, but a collection of many pictures, which we can turn into a visual photo album. Here I have five photos, all sitting off stage, just waiting to do a morph dramatic entrance, like we did at the beginning.

But pay close attention, I have the upcoming photo just peaking on the edge before it move center stage by growing.

For the next slide, I have the upcoming photo being previewd on the right side, and as it moves in, the previous center stage photo shrinks and sits just to the left.

Watch how this plays out.

This looks almost film like, as the photo peeks on the right side and then frows and glides into the center stage, only to the then shrink and almsot exits to the left, while the next photo glides in.

And any given time, we have three photos on the slide, the previes of both the upcoming photo and the exiting photo plus the main photo.

I must point out that on some computers, you do need to give the slide show a extra moment to build the slide before clicking, as it does take some extra powerful compute cycles.

Once you understand the on and off stage techniques, you can build almost any special effect you so desire for your slide show.

Lets open you eyes to one last theme and that is to build you own slide transiton. Basically we will creae some wild special effect to go automatically between your slides.

HOw did we do that? Basically we create two empty slides with a varing rainbox color effect.

With a blank layout, we went to FORMAT BACKGROUND and selected GRADIENT FILL and then cliced on the individaul markers to change the colors on the first slide, And made a different set of colors on the other slide.

But the extra trick is to make the slide automatically advance so to give the illusion of a slide transiton. Here I turned off ON MOUSE CLICK and instead foudn tha matching time for the AFTER effect to automated the slide transiton.

For our tutorial, this is moving slow, but you can create your own slide transitons now that I’ve planted the idea into your brain.

And there you go, you are ready to put the morph transition tool to work. If this tutorial was helpful, do like and share with friends. Don’t forget to subscribe to support our channel and if you want to learn EVERYTHING about PowerPoint, visit our PowerPoint school of free training at power-up.training. Until next time, POWER UP