How To Add Motion Paths To Animations In PowerPoint

In our next tutorial we're going to have a look at how we add motion paths to our animation, so I'm going to start by opening up PowerPoint. Okay and I'm going to open up an example presentation there using animation motion paths. Okay so I've only got two slides in this presentation that just there for demonstration purposes we will come back to a little purple circle in a second nothing much going on in there.

On my first slide though I've got a couple of photographs there's Jenny and Sarah and I can tell them by their labels above now this is already animated let's have a quick look at the animation so on a click the two photographs fly in from the top and the two labels flying from the bottom simultaneously and meet in the middle there. Now it's not entirely what I'm after what I want is for the two photographs to come down from the left-hand side at the same point but one after each other and then when they get to about that point then they will fly over to the right and stop.



Okay and then the same will happen with the labels the labels will come up from the right-hand side a stop and then fly into position above the photographs okay so there this is job for motion paths and let's have a look now before we do this one of the problems with motion paths is getting your objects to finish in just the right position and what can help is with that our guides so I'll switch on the guides.

Now first of all I consider these pictures aren't quite in the center now I could move the guides hover over the guide and move it into a particular position or of course I could select all of these moving those to the guides. Let's just move those in there like that so top left-hand corner of Sarah's photo is right at the centre point top right-hand corner of Jenny right in the centre point there and the same wave of the two labels now if I was going to do this with a lot of objects I could put on multiple guides just drag that guy to the side with the control key pressed and I get another guide.

Okay so I can use those guides to carefully position the objects that are just dragged enough so I'm think I'm going to be happy with the horizontal vertical guide there now some look at the animations themselves. Okay so simple animation there on a click Jenny picture on the left there comes in immediately Sara comes on and the two labels as well so they're all fly-in effects pictures from the top labels from the bottom.

Now what I need to do first of all is let's move those pictures over to the left that should be enough and I'm going to align those left as well there you go and do the same with the two labels okay so I'm going to move those over to the right and I will align those to the left should be it's okay so all of those things are going to come on at exactly the same time just the pictures will fly down to this point and the labels will come up to this point.

Now Jenny is the picture behind there I'm going to select Jenny's animation at that point what I need to do is add an extra animation so once the fly in effect has happened I want it to move over to the right hand side. I head back to the animations tab now I'm not going to change the animation here I want to add an additional animation so add animation and the down at the bottom motion paths. Now we've got a range of pre-built motion paths there so aligned and archit our loops and we can even draw our own custom path and there are more motion paths available or present motion paths err on the more motion path option there now I just want a simple line I click it and there is the line and you can see a sort of shadow image of Jenny there.

Now I don't down I wanted to go to the right so for a line I have the options there of making it go to the right okay and you can see the green point marks the starting point of Jenny's photo okay and the red dot there is the ending point so I'm going to hold the shift key so I get a perfect line let's click it first that's it hold the shift key drag it and this is where Jenny's going to end up using the guides I should hopefully get that right in position again. I can now move that up to the top there so once Jenny's flown in it will slide to the right now I want that happen with the previous not at the same time obviously so I'm going to put in a delay there so that will wait until Jenny has flown in.

Okay let's do the same with Jenny's text so Jenny's text there we add an animation it's going to be a line this time the option will be to the left. Okay and again Jenny's text needs to be right over on the left hand side so I drag that holding down the shift key so I get a perfect line that should do it. Okay and there you go so motion paths I still need to drag Jenny's text up to their that's it's Jenny's text there and with previous and I will again put in a delay. Now let's repeat that for Sarah so Sarah adds animation a motion path. Sara's going to go to the right, oops that's the one there hold down shift as a drag here see if I get that lined up perfectly drag her in place second animation with the previous and I will delay it till after the fly-in and the final thing is Sara's text box there let's get that to go to the left with a motion path left that's the wand Sarah this time I just has to go a little bit there should just about be it.

Okay so our final thing there is we move we change that to width previous and we'll just delay it until after the text boxes right. now hopefully all on a click at the top let's give it a go so one click that's it now I think I could probably do a little bit better than that by delaying the two sets of animations there and of course I haven't quite got the alignment right there that just needs a little bit of tweaking but they go mode using a motion path I can get the object to move on the slide. Now let's try that with a second slide at this time I just want to get this little ball the circle to go around in a much bigger circle in orbits if you like okay so I'm going to select it and add a motion path and this time I'm going to go for shapes there so shapes and there is the shape okay now it just a it's going to go in a sort of a very small orbit at the moment before I change that let's go to effect options and I can set that shape to be a diamond a triangle hexagon or a range of other shapes though.

Okay so I'm going to stick with a circle I can also edit the points now I can drag that bounding box out as well but at this time I'm going to choose edit points okay and I can actually drag the points of that circle down so that should allowance the size of the circle that should be far enough down so quite an odd shape there and let's drag that over to the right to about there and the other side like that so this allows me to change the geometry of the circle and then using these little handles I can tweak that that's about it lets drag it down and then you can see how it can change the geometry of the circle like that same on this side let's do one more a bottom now I don't know buddy take a little bit more care over this okay so much more of an ellipse this time of course and let's see how that looks.

On a click and around it goes okay and at that point it's simply a case of let's duplicate that shape are you going to duplicate let's give it a go and that's better out of position the shape right on top of itself there this time is going to be with the previous and a little bit of a delay okay so and let's repeat that duplicate and with a little bit of a delay and move it up and we'll do one more duplicate the shape difficult a and why not bit of a delay and last one a little bit of a delay okay. So on a click the first one will go and the other five circles will follow after a short delay let's give it a click and see how we look.

Not too bad so quite effective animation in a very short space of time simply by using motion paths okay so I hope you found that useful look forward to seeing you on the next video tutorial.