When it is time to present your data, sometimes printed files such as spreadsheets and documents are not as impactful as we would like them to be. This often means that we use programs such as PowerPoint to create digital presentations of our data. Yet, much like with printed handouts, it is easy for PowerPoint presentations to become flat and a little boring

PowerPoint has a set of tools that can help us highlight the data that is important, and that can add additional visual appeal to the slides that we create. These tools are called animations.

Often when people think about an animation in PowerPoint, they think about the fun special effects that can play in between slides or as a bulleted list appears on the screen. However the animation tools in PowerPoint also allow us to do much more such as highlighting a certain part of spreadsheet, fading a part of a document away to highlight another, adding motion to graphs, and adding effects to SmartArt so that the important parts of our data and processes stand out.

To learn more about how to use animations in PowerPoint, click here.