Familiar with Microsoft PowerPoint? Then you probably know that it includes an animation feature that lets you animate text, pictures, movie clips, charts, sounds, any other types of objects.

Not only does animation make a presentation visually appealing to the audience, it also offers the following benefits:

• Animation lets you draw attention to specific information on a slide.
• Animation lets you control the flow of information within a slide.
• Animation lets you control transitions between slides.

The remainder of this series of articles will show you how to build animation into your PowerPoint presentations. So let’s begin by looking at slide transitions.

Slide Transitions

Slide Transitions lets you control how the slides in a presentation progress from one to another. The default transition is that each slide simply appears one after another. By using the Slide Transition option, you can apply special transitions, sounds, timings, etc. as slides move from one to another.

To configure Slide Transitions in PowerPoint 2002:

1. Open your presentation.
2. From the Slide Show menu, click Slide Transition. The Slide Transition pane will appear along the side of your PowerPoint window.
3. Select the special effect you want to use and the speed at which you want the transition effect to occur.
4. Once you select a special effect, PowerPoint will show you a preview of the transition.
5. Click Play to see a preview again.
6. By default, PowerPoint will advance to the next slide using the special effect when you click the mouse. Note: you can advance through each slide after a certain amount of time.
7. Finally, to apply the special effect to all slides in the presentation, click Apply to All Slides.

You can also set a sound to play as the slide moves to the next window. On top of that, you can loop the sound until the next sound plays.