Video: Trigger an animation effect

When you want to click a specific thing on a slide to start an animation effect, use a trigger. Triggers give you specific click points for controlling animation, and are especially useful when you want several effects on a slide.

Trigger an animation effect to begin when you click it

1. On the ANIMATIONS tab, in the Advanced Animation group, click Animation Pane.

2. In the Animation Pane, select the animated shape or other object that you want to trigger to begin playing when you click it.

3. In the Advanced Animation group, click Trigger, point to On Click of, and then, select the object.

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Trigger an animation effect to play

When you want to click something specific on the slide, like each arrow shape here, to start an animation effect, use a trigger.

On this slide, each green arrow triggers a text effect when I click it.

Here is the sequence, again: Arrow 1 triggers the first text animation, which is a Wipe entrance effect.

Arrow 2 triggers the second effect, and Arrow 3 triggers the third.

Compare this with a typical list animation, where I click to play each effect, but I don’t click anything specific to do it.

In the first example, the effect starts only when I click an arrow, which is a trigger for the effect.

So, triggers let me specify click points for effects.

I can create as many triggers as I need.

For example, I could make this text banner be a trigger also—starting a picture effect.

To set up a trigger, you first apply an animation effect to the thing you want to trigger.

For this slide, I want to trigger a text effect on this banner shape.

I’ll select the shape and apply a Wipe entrance effect.

Now, I specify a trigger for the effect. In the Animation Pane, I select the effect, which activates the Trigger command.

I click Trigger, point to On Click of, and select Arrow 1, which is my arrow shape over here.

Now the arrow is a trigger.

Triggers are useful for starting sound files and videos, which PowerPoint views as animation effects.

Instead of clicking the sound media on this slide to play it, I can pull it off the slide, so it never appears, and set up a trigger to play it, namely this button shape.

On the slide, when I click the button, it triggers the sound effect.

On a slide with video, I can do the same thing: pull the video media off the slide, set it to Play Full Screen, and create a trigger to start it— this big green arrow.

On the slide, when I click the big green arrow, it triggers the video to play.

Up Next: Use triggers for multiple effects, including sound.