Hello everyone. Today I'm gonna show you a really simple trick in PowerPoint that you can apply immediately to your slides and it just adds that little professional edge. Now, if you're wondering what I'm talking about, here's an example. Many of us create slides which have things like bullet points on them, and what I've done here is I've added some animation so that the bullet points fly in one at a time when I click my mouse.
But notice that I've added. Dimming effect as well, which means that the point that I'm currently talking about is always the one that stands out from the rest of the list. And this is a really simple effect to achieve. So let's dive in and take a look at how we do it. So I've opened up my presentation and I just have five or so bullet points on here.
Now, currently there isn't any animation applied to these bullet points. So if I was to run this slide show, the bullet points are just going to appear there on the slide. I want them to fly in from the left. So the first thing we need to do is apply animation. Now a really important point to note here when it comes to animation, notice that I have all of my bullet points inside one placeholder, so I don't have a placeholder for each of the bullet points.
So if I was to select the placeholder and apply the animation, let's do that by going to the animations tab and fly in. It's basically going to fly in all of the bullet points at the same time. When I click again, that isn't the effect that I'm looking for. So let's go back to none. What we need to do here is we need to select each bullet point individually and then apply the animation.
So we're gonna select the first one from the animations tab. I want this to fly in, but I don't want it to fly in from the bottom. I want it to fly in from the left. So this is where we go directly across to effect options and choose from left. That's exactly what I want. Now I'm gonna do the same for each of these, and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do this quickly because you can't use the animation painter when you have all of the bullet points inside one placeholder.
So we're gonna say fly in, effect options from left, and I'm gonna speed this video up to do the rest.
Okay, so let's check to make sure that's working. First of all, let's run the slideshow when I click my mouse, first, bullet point, second, third, fourth and fifth. So we are looking good so far. Now the next thing I want to apply is that dimming effect, so that when we finish talking about one point, it greys out.
Now, the way that we do this is to open up the Animation pane. So again, on the Animations tab, in the Advanced Animations group, we want to open Animation Pane. Now in this pane, we can see any animation that we have applied in the presentation. So you can see each of the bullet points just here. So I'm gonna go to the first one, click the dropdown, and we're gonna go to Effect Options.
And notice in the enhancement section at the bottom, it says, after animation don't dim. So we want to click the dropdown, and if you are expecting a dim option in here, we don't have that. What we can do is select a colour for the text to dim to. So if we do this light grey kind of colour, it will have the effect of it dimming out and click on Okay. So now you can see that when it comes in, it greys out. Now we can do the rest of these all together in one go simply by selecting the second animation holding down shift and selecting the last one, clicking the dropdown arrow Effect Options. And then we're gonna choose that grey colour and click on, okay, so now when we run our presentation, we should have the effect that we're looking for.
Click the mouse. The point flies in. We finish talking about that point, click again, it greys out, and the second one is highlighted, so on and so forth. So a really simple little effect there, but something that makes a big difference in your PowerPoint presentations.
