I’ve been sending samples of the bullet-less presentation right and left. Seems quite a few of the Lockergnome readers really want to know how to do a better job with their presentations, but don’t know where to start.

While most of the next few articles are going to be how to decide what should be in your presentation and how to hide what you may not need, this episode is a further look at the triggers I used in the bullet-less presentations.

PPT 2002 and 2003 offer advanced animations, and these animations allow you to do things in sequence or out of sequence. To do things out of sequence, you use animation triggers.

The hardest thing to understand about triggers is that you don’t set an object to trigger animations, you set objects to be triggered by the click of an object.

To set up a trigger, add the object to be animated to your slide and animate it. Right click the animation and select “Timing” and the Timing tab will appear:

See the “Trigger” button? Clicking it exposes the bottom half of the dialog. You can choose to set an animation to start as part of a click sequence or via the click of an object on the slide. Click the radio button for “Start effect on click of.” Using the dropdown arrow, select the object on the slide that will trigger the animation.

To test the animation, run the slide. When you move your cursor over the triggering object, it will change to a pointing hand. Click and your triggered animation will happen.

Tip: If you want to make something appear and move on a single trigger, set up both animations. Set the trigger for the appear animation, then drag the movement animation below the appear one in the timeline. To then make it disappear, set up an exit animation and have it triggered by a click of itself.