Adding animation to your PowerPoint will help you make a dynamic presentation. Here's how you can use animation in PowerPoint efficiently.

If you’re working on an important presentation, you want to make sure everyone in the audience is paying attention to you. Besides having all the relevant information and a good speech, you can add animations to your PowerPoint slides as a tool to engage the audience.

Using animations, you can keep your audience focused through a lengthy meeting and highlight important details, so they’re easier to remember. We’ve put together a quick list of animation tips to help you create a dynamic PowerPoint presentation.

You can use PowerPoint tools to animate pictures, text, tables, shapes, and other objects to build an engaging presentation. Let’s take a quick look at the animation type, so you have an idea of which type better fits your presentation.

Now, let's take a look at how you can make the most out of PowerPoint animations.

Before you start working on your presentation, draw an outline of how it should look. Think about how your idea can reach your audience and how the different animation types will help you achieve your goal. Also, planning ahead is one of the most efficient ways to save time when creating a PowerPoint presentation.

No matter how excited you are to make your PowerPoint presentation stand out, you shouldn’t animate anything until you’ve finished adding every piece of information and object.

Think about it. You’ve animated a picture, but now you need to resize it, so its details are more visible. The resized picture might cover a piece of text or other objects when it enters or moves around the slide, so you’ll have to edit the slide once again.

If you add a lot of pictures, icons, or text, it’s easier to lose track of them, and you might have a hard time identifying the object that you want to animate or edit. To avoid losing time, you should rename every object right after you insert it.

To do it, select the Home tab. Then, head to the Editing menu and click Select > Selection Pane. To rename the object, double-click on its current name, and the name field will become editable.

If you want to prepare a professional presentation, less is more. You don’t need to animate everything in your presentation as it might confuse the audience. Instead, think about the most important parts and use animation to make them really stand out.

Take a look at each slide and decide what your audience should focus on. Once you’ve found it, you can use an emphasis animation to spotlight that piece of information. If there are multiple elements that you want to animate, don’t have them moving at the same time. Instead, give them some progression.

Also, having too many types of animations will distract your audience from the idea that you’re trying to share. If there are too many objects moving on your screen, your audience’s focus will be all over the place, and some of them might even quit following your slides. This is why you shouldn’t use more than three animation types throughout your presentation.

Depending on the animation, you’ll have to adjust its speed. You can’t have a Spin animation and the object bolting across the screen without any chance for your audience to see it. To adjust the speed, select the object or text that you've animated. Then, in the Animations tab, open the Start menu and select the duration and when it should start.

If you select With Previous, the animation will start at the same time as the previous animation. If you select After Previous, the animation will start right after the previous effect finishes. You can set a Delay value to have a small break between effects. For better control, you should select the On Click option.

Think about how your audience will visualize the information. If there’s a lot of displayed information, they might scan it, instead of listening to you. Think where your audience focus should be and use animations to stimulate that focus.

As you work on your PowerPoint presentation and add animations, you should constantly check how they look. But pressing F5 and having the slideshow start from the beginning will take a lot of time if you have many slides and animations. Instead, there’s a quicker way to check how the animations on certain slides look.

You’ll notice that the slides with animations have a little star next to them. If you click the star icon, the animations will start playing. Additionally, you can go to the Animations tab and click Preview to view the animations on the selected slide.

Once you’ve finished your presentation, press F5 and watch the entire slideshow. Observe the animations’ pace. Does your audience have enough time to get the entire information? Is the screen too crowded with too many objects moving at the same time? In this case, you may want to adjust the pace or even remove some animations.

With these PowerPoint animation tips, you are now set to captivate your audience’s attention. It may take a while to figure out which animation you should use, but it will help you better control how you deliver information to your audience.

If you’re confident that you’ve put together the best PowerPoint presentation but are worried about speaking in public, there are a few apps that could help you beat this fear.

Matthew has always been passionate about technology, which led him to graduate with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering. Having left the corporate world, he joined the MUO team in 2021. Now, he focuses on troubleshooting guides and tips that improve the experience readers have with their devices.

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