Dynamic text

Text may be the most important medium still even in the days of fancy multimedia and fancy special effects. Nothing replaces text that is large enough to read comfortably and designed skillfully enough to take into account that CRT monitors lack the resolution for easy reading no matter what color combinations, fonts, and font size you choose.

Now having said that, what we want to point out is that today with widely available tools like a recent version of PowerPoint such as ours, 2002, you can be very fancy with text using PowerPoint's various animation functions.

Under the main menu options, pick slide show and then animation schemes. Select some text you have entered, perhaps as a bullet. Then select one of the effects. The effects are categorized into normal, moderate and exciting. Once chosen, you can play the effect for just the slide by selecting play which should be at the bottom of the animation panel. You have to experiment with effects to get a feeling for what you can do and how it can best help you meet the objective of the slide rather than be merely an interesting curiosity. We like effects such as dissolve in, elegant, and bounce.

Now to get even fancier, go to custom animation under the main menu option, slide show. After selecting your text, then select Add Effect. Here you can now designate when the effect should take place, at entrance, to emphasize it when it is already visible, or on exit. A last choice is motion paths. This choice allows you to designate a path that the text will follow. There are supplied paths and also an option allowing you to enter your own path. Note that there are also options for color and speed of the effect. We found that the defaults are usually too fast so we almost always modify the speed to slow the effect down. Once you select when and then select the effect, you can preview the effect again by choosing play at the bottom of the screen. Once you select an effect, notice that part of your object, text, appears in the custom animation panel and you are offered the little pull down arrow on the right. If you click on this arrow, you will find yet more options including options for the specific effect you selected. Some possibilities are to add sound, to specify the effect should be applied letter by letter or word by word, or even applied in reverse order.

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