You mentioned animation earlier. Are you talking Seth MacFarlane? Family Guy? Please, fill us in. Your talents seem to know no bounds.

Well thank you, Sue. Just as you can import any image, you can import any animation.

But what if you're in a hurry? What if you don't have time to make your own animation? I'll be able to do my own animation when pigs fly.

Is that a challenge? With my library of animation effects, you can do all sorts of things easily. For example, I'm going to help you make pigs fly.

Adding your own artwork When you animate an object, you add special visual or sound effects to it. The following steps will show you how to animate a cartoon image while working in Slide View. 1. If you are not already in Normal (Slide) View, click the Normal View button in the View tab. 2. On the slide, click the cartoon image to select it. 3. From the Animations Group in the Animations tab, click on the Custom Animation button. The Custom Animation task pane will appear. 4. From the Custom Animation task pane, click the Add Effect button, select Entrance, then select Fly In.  5. Decide how you want the effect to appear by using the options in the Custom Animation task pane: when it starts, its direction, and its speed.

Another thing I can do is animate text. This is a great thing to do with titles and credits. For example, you can make text appear as if it is being typed letter by letter by a typewriter.

This is just blowing my mind. It looks like the title sequence from a movie or something!

Animating Text Try adding the typewriter effect to text on your slide. 1. In Slide View, select the text you want to animate by clicking it. 2. From the Animations Group in the Animations tab, click on the Custom Animation button. The Custom Animation task pane will appear. Click the Add Effect button, select Entrance, then select More Effects.  3. The Add Entrance Effect dialog box will appear. Scroll down the list and click Color Typewriter. Then click OK.

Can you also animate charts?

You know it. This is really an effective tool. Let's say you're doing a chart on how the ozone layer has been depleted in the past 100 years. You can have the chart start in 1900, and reveal the depletion year by year. By the time you reach the present year, revealing depletion at its worst, people will really understand your point.

Wow! What an impact. That ozone is heavy stuff. Does that mean I can't use hair spray?

Let's save that for another show. For today, let me show you how to animate the chart instead.

Animating a chart You can make charts more interesting by animating them. In a Slide Show, an unanimated chart appears onscreen all at once. When you animate a chart, the chart appears "bit by bit". You specify the way the elements of the chart will appear in the Custom Animation dialog box. Try animating a chart so that the elements of the chart are introduced onscreen by category. 1. In Slide View, click the chart you want to animate. 2. From the Animations Group in the Animations tab, click on the Custom Animation button. The Custom Animation task pane will appear. 3. Click the Add Effect button, and select an effect. In the task pane, click the arrow next to the effect you just selected. Select Effect Options and the Effect Options dialog box will appear. 4. Click the Chart Animation tab, then select By Category. Click OK and the animation effect will be applied to each chart element. Note: You can also add an animation effect to a SmartArt graphic. You would follow the same steps used above to add an animation effect to a chart. As you can do with a chart, the animation effect can be applied to the whole SmartArt graphic, or "bit by bit". These options are in the SmartArt Animation tab found in the Effect Options dialog box.

Let's say I create this really cool sequence in one slide where my banner flies in, then my charts, then some text, then a flying pig. What happens if I want to change the order? What if I want the pig to fly in first?

Hey, you're the director and you get to make those choices. With PowerPoint you have complete control over animation order.

Changing animation order Normally, the object that is animated appears first, but you can rearrange the order. Here's what you do: 1. Click the object you want to change. For example, the flying pig. 2. From the Custom Animation task pane,  click the animation effect you want to edit. Now drag the animation effect to the position you want it to appear.

Okay, I've reordered the animation. Now, how can I preview it to make sure it works right?

Previewing an animation PowerPoint lets you preview animation settings for your current slide without running the entire slide show. 1. In Slide View, go to the slide you want to preview. 2. From the Animations Group in the Animations tab, click on the Custom Animation button. The Custom Animation task pane will appear. Click the Play button to see a preview. Alternatively, in the Animations tab, click on the Preview button in the Preview Group. You will see the animation effect that has been applied to the selected slide as well as any transition effects.