Habitually Good

Very recently, I saw a presentation where there were certain slides which were left for the audience to scan through, with little or no voice from the presenter. These slides had simple text which you would scan through, or most likely ignore as an audience. However, there was one small difference on these slides – as you scanned the text, selective words in on the slide were being emphasized – drawing your attention to key points on the slide.

I found that effect very useful, and tried to put it in my next presentation. This is where things got stuck. PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to animate selective words in a text. You can apply animation effects to complete sentences only. This means that there needs to be a hack to get that effect which I saw. To clarify, I made a video of the effect that I am looking to achieve (embedded below the disclaimer).

Disclaimer: a lot of you may already know how to do this, but it took me a bit to figure it out (specially since I kept thinking how to do it natively in PowerPoint).

So, now that it is clear what I am trying to achieve, let me explain how I did it.

The trick is to first accept that you cannot do it using normal animation functionality of PowerPoint. Once I did that, it becomes quite easy.

Step 1: Identify the words that you want to highlight on the slide.

Step 2: Create text boxes with white background and same font size as your slide text for each of these words (you can see where this is heading).

Step 3: Position the text boxes on top of your words and center them horizontally (since if you are using bold emphasis, it would tend to move your text to the right) and align the bottom edge with the bottom edge of the rest of the text – use Ctrl+arrow key to nudge the boxes into position.

Step 4: Add animation effects on each of these boxes. Now here’s what you want to play with to get the settings right according to your taste. I have an entry and exit effect on each of the boxes. The first text box entry effect starts 1 second after the slide is shown, and each subsequent word’s entry effect starts the same time as the exit effect of the previous word. I am using the “Fade” entry and exit effects. Here’s a screenshot of the timeline:

The exit effect is setup to “Start after previous” with a delay of 1 second. This gives the word being highlighted 1 second to stay highlighted before it is faded out.

Here’s a screenshot of the slide showing the text boxes on each word:

And here’s a screenshot that shows the text boxes displaced (to show that there is normal text underneath the text boxes). Note that I have made the background of the text boxes a little transparent for illustration purposes – in practice this should be opaque.

If there are other easier ways to do this, I would certainly love to know about them. But in the meantime, this is what I will be using.

If you would like to have the PPT file for this experiment, it is available at this link.

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