August 28, 1997
If you find your audience yawning halfway through your multimedia presentations, maybe it's time to give your designs a boost. These PowerPoint 97 tips will help you add life--or at least animation and audio--to your PC slide shows.

Do It Gradually
You have a big presentation coming up and you need to develop some pretty complex charts. To make the information a little easier for your audience to digest, why not make each item appear on your chart as you discuss it? This is a snap with PowerPoint 97. Just click the chart to select it, then choose Slide Show, then Custom Animation. Click the Chart Effects tab and use the arrow at the right of the "Introduce Chart Elements" box to expand it. Next choose the condition that best fits your requirements, then click the Timing tab. In Timing, select the Animate and On Mouse Click radio buttons. Click OK and go to Slide Show to see how your animated chart looks. To add the elements, click the mouse anywhere.

Ready, Clip Art, Action!
To discover the magic of clip art animation, create a blank slide and choose Insert, Picture, ClipArt. Locate the image you like, select it, and click Insert (we'll use the light bulb as an example). Click the picture on your slide to select it and choose Draw, then Ungroup. Click Yes in the dialog box that appears. Now click somewhere on the slide other than the picture. Next, click the light bulb, then choose Slide Show, Custom Animation, then Effects. Choose the effect you want to apply to the light bulb and click the Timing tab. In Timing, select the radio buttons labeled Animate and On Mouse Click. When you show the slide and click the mouse button, PowerPoint will automatically animate the image.

Animation? Check If you're viewing a slide in PowerPoint's Slide Miniature view, you can preview the animated graphic by simply clicking the thumbnail. Seasoned PowerPoint 7.0 users will notice that this action no longer toggles the slide between black and white and color. Don't be alarmed. To check out a black and white or color rendition of the miniature slide, right-click the miniature, then choose from the menu that appears.

Voiceovers
To prepare a narrated version of any part of your presentation, go to the slide to which you want to add the audio and choose Insert, Movies and Sounds, then Record Sounds. When you're ready to start recording, click the red Record button. When you're finished, click the black Stop button. Click OK, and the sound icon will appear on your slide. You can use the mouse to move the icon to any location.

Recycling: Not Just For Plastic Anymore
You spent hours last week creating a really cool animated slide presentation and now your boss wants a repeat performance, but for a different topic. Luckily, you won't have to start from scratch. If you want to use objects from a previous presentation, just try this: Open both the old presentation and the new one you're working on. To display both presentations simultaneously, choose Window, then Arrange All. Locate the slides you want to use in the new presentation, then move or copy them from one slide to the other. To move objects, simply drag them from frame to frame. To copy them, hold down the Ctrl key, select the object, and drag it to the new slide.