Leading the way in Microsoft Office Development

Step 1 - What is a Slide Transition ?

Slide Transitions are not technically animations because they do not involve movement of the individual items on a slide.

A transition is the special effect used to move from one slide to another.

Slide transitions refer to the way slides change from one to the next during a slide show.

They can be used to break the monotony of changing slides and can include special effects such as fading etc

Automatic slide transitions

Any automatic transitions must be set up and you can either assign the same transition time to all the slides or you define a separate one for each slide.

Step 2 - Slide Transition Task Pane

Display the slide transition task pane by selecting (Slide Show > Slide Transition)

Displays all the transition information in the task pane

There are over 50 types of slide transitions that can be used

You can make the slides fade out, dissolve into each other

Select the slide you want to add the transition to

Selecting an option will change the active slide to show you an example.

mark the "Automatically After" checkbox ??

The Modify transition section lets you modify the speed of the transition and also lets you add sound as well.

Step 3 - Adding a Slide Transition

Move to the slide you want to apply the transition to.

You will probably want to work in Slide Sorter view for this. (View > Slide Sorter).

This will allow you see more than one slide at a time.

This will display the slide transition task pane.

select the slide you want to use.

PowerPoint will preview the transition by animating the current slide.

If you want to see the preview again then just select the transition again.

Changing the Speed

slow, medium, fast

Changing the Sound

The sounds drop-down lets you choose from a selection of different sounds

You can also choose "Other Sound" and use your own ",wav" file.

Changing to the next Slide

If you want the slide to automatically advance to the next slide check the automatically check box

Lets you select the number of seconds the slide will be displayed before automatically advancing to the next slide

If you don’t select the "Apply to all slides" button then the transition will only be applied to the current slide.

You can apply this animation to all the slides by selecting "Apply to all slides".

Things to consider:

Computer Speed - Transitions look better on faster computers. If your computer is a bit slow then change the speed to fast so the transition will not drag.

When you are working in slide sorter view you can click the little star in the bottom left corner below each slide to preview the transition for that slide.

The automatic timing is also shown below the slide if it is set to "automatically advance" ??

Things to Remember

There is a "random" transition which will choose a different slide transition for each slide. This is not recommended.

To maximise the impact of the transition, use slides with contrasting colour schemes.

It is not recommended to combine both automatic and manual transitions in the same presentation. This will make it very confusing for the presenter.