One PowerPoint feature that’s somewhat lacking in Google Docs Presentations is the ability to animate a presentation. We’ll show you how to animate a slide as well as how some people have created a workaround. The primary animation option available in Presentations is for animating an object or text box to sequentially reveal the text or object when presenting. To do this on a slide that contains a text area, for example, click on the text container to select it, right-click and select ‘Incremental Reveal’. When you play the presentation and view this slide, you’ll see that the elements in the text area appear line by line as you press the right arrow key.
You can do the same thing with shapes so you could add a shape to a presentation slide and then add some text in a text box over the top of it, for example. To animate each shape, first make sure they’re layered in the correct order; if not, right-click, select Order and then 'Bring Forward’ or ‘Send Backwards’ as required. Right-click the shape border and select ‘Incremental Reveal’. Repeat this for the text box on top of the shape.
At presentation time, each shape will appear in order as you press the right arrow key. To undo the effect, right-click the edge of the object and select ‘Incremental Reveal’ again to deselect it. As you work through the presentation, you can use the left arrow key to hide items you’ve revealed and the right arrow key to reveal them.
Recently, some intrepid Google Docs users created a 450-slide presentation, which they played quite fast to produce a stop-motion animation. You can find a video of it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt9F7tKcZcU. You can find the actual presentation at http://tinyurl.com/googledocsanimation and add it to your Google Docs document collection.
Once you’ve viewed the movie, work through the original presentation to see how the effect was achieved. You’ll see that each slide is a little different to the slide before it. When you view the presentation, if you press and hold the right arrow key, the slides will play very fast, showing how the stop-motion animation effect is achieved.
