One of my clients emailed me today asking how to have automatic animations and music in the same presentation. In this case, what had been previously a presenter driven presentation was being converted to a kiosk.

When you are creating a presentation for a presenter, there is no problem setting the animations to happen when the presenter clicks the mouse. However, in a kiosk you don’t have that option. If no one is running the presentation, no one can click to start the animations.

Most people get the animations set to start “after previous”, but then the animations tend to wait for the music to end before they start. Not what you want.

There are two ways around the problem. the good way and the easy way.

The good way is to set the entire sequence of animations to start with previous, but with increasing delays so that they open one at a time. This works best if you turn on the animation timeline and work there. You can then move each animation as you need to.

The easy way is to insert a slide before the current slide. Have that slide look like the starting point of your slide. Put the music there and set the music to play through two slides. Then, give the slide an automatic transition of 0 seconds. The music will start, the slide will change, the animations will start and continue. The audience won’t know the slide even changed, since it will look like the start of the next slide.

[tags]PowerPoint, animations, music, slides[/tags]