Using transitions in PowerPoint presentations

PowerPoint presentation skills, Advanced Presentation skills and Presentation skills are three of the courses trained by Total Success Training, a training consultancy specialising in communication training and management skills in London and throughout the UK. Other related courses include sales presentation skills, training the trainer, assertiveness skills, selling skills, negotiation skills and communication skills for managers. Click here if you need more information regarding presentation skills course information or contact Total Success who will be delighted to talk to you via e-mail. 

Using transitions

Good transitions are critical to an effective presentation. They help tie your presentation together and make it flow smoothly from one idea to the next. Plus, transitions signal important ideas so your audience pays extra attention.

Transition effects also can be used with graphics such as tables, charts and graphs. You can add transitions and movement to individual slices of a pie chart, bars in a bar graph, rows in a table or levels of an organisation chart.

PowerPoint offers you more control over the number of elements that you can apply transition effects to, easier access to transition effects and better preview capabilities, allowing you to try out various transition effects before applying them.

Types of Transition Effects

• Blinds -- the new slide is unveiled in a series of horizontal or vertical rows, similar to the effect of opening the blinds of a window.

• Boxes -- the new slide "grows" from the middle of the previous slide, or grows inward from the edges of the screen.

• Checkerboards -- the new slide appears over the previous slide as a series of boxes.

• Dissolves - an advanced case of checkerboards, where the new screen is unveiled in numerous small boxes or other graphic elements.

• Wipes - the new slide replaces the previous slide from left to right, top to bottom, or diagonally.

• Fades through black - the first slide fades to black before the next slide is revealed.

• Splits - the new slide expands horizontally or vertically from the center of the screen.

• Builds - points in a text chart are highlighted one point at a time. This prevents your audience from reading ahead of you by focusing their attention on the point you're discussing and dimming previously introduced points.

Choosing the Right Transition Effect

Your transition choices should be based on your message, your audience and the presentation environment (the computer hardware used to deliver the presentation and the length of the presentation itself).

Some tips to help you select the right transition effect for the right time:

1. Reflect your message. Your transitions should reflect the basic feeling of your presentation. Is your message intended to be entertaining, instructional or motivational? Should it be serious or light-hearted? Are you communicating good news or bad news?
2. Your presentation reflects your audience. Consider the formality of your presentation and the expectations of your audience.
3. Pay attention to the environment. Consider the level of technology you're using to deliver your presentation. Advanced transition effects add demands on the computer and can slow it down if you have included effects beyond its comfort level.
4. Presentation length should be considered part of the presentation environment. Transitional effects appropriate for short presentations become tiring during long presentations. Entertainment quickly turns to boredom and then annoyance when the same effects are used over and over.
5. Use them as pacing elements. Because transition effects can be applied to every slide or just individual slides within a presentation, you can use transitions as a pacing tool. Pacing involves chunking, or dividing, your presentation into smaller sections (similar to chapters in a book).

For more information on our other PowerPoint presentation skills pages click on the links below:

PowerPoint presentation course agenda

PowerPoint presentation tips and techniques

Using visual aids in PowerPoint presentations

How to use transitions in PowerPoint presentations

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationskills.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationcourse.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationnerves.htm

http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/presentationtraining.htm

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