If you want the shadow to animate with the text in 2007, you must apply a
text shadow as opposed to a shape shadow.
I disagree with this, to a certain extent, as I think that it is a bug. A
bug that's reproduceable in 07 running on an XP machine (with compatibility
pack), BTW.
Had the same problem last night, client flying out for a review meeting this
morning and only has 2007 on her machine, PPT file created and edited in XP.
She’s freaking out because the shadows appear before the text. I checked it
on my 07 and was able to reproduce it, but I noticed one significant thing,
the Title Placeholder animated correctly, the Body Placeholder did not --
black shadow first then white text animated on top of it. The question then
became: why the difference?
So, after reading this tip, removing the shadows and uploading for her, I
ran some tests. I created 4 masters in the same file and applied different
animations to each pair of placeholders so that on one master, the
autolayouts both wipe from left, or ascend. I made the 4th one with
animations that I wouldn't normally use on text, like Pinwheel.
On each slide, I had a title, a line of body text and then copied those
shapes below to remove them from the master, and applied the same animation.
With only one exception, any animation that was on a Text placeholder did the
black-shadow-before-text problem but the Title placeholder did not. The
shapes below that were not tied to a placeholder animated correctly (except
on one set, where I applied both a motion path and a fade, both of them did
the problem). I tested this on computers that had both Nvidia and ATI cards,
with compatibility pack and without, Vista business and home edition, and
Windows XP.
I also used one of the standard templates in 07 to test this bug theory, I
chose Flow, which co-incidentally enough, doesn't have a shadow on the
subtitle placeholder. I made similar slides, only using the title layout and
was able to reproduce the shadow appearing before the text when I applied a
shape shadow to the body text (subtitle). Thinking that's kind of odd, I then
checked all the other template designs that came with 07 and none of them
have a shadow of any kind on body text. There are fancy drop shadows and
effects applied to the Title text in the master, but never the text or
subtitle. Interesting.
I can guess what you're thinking: geez, you're really anal and why bother
doing all that work for something so insignificant? Well, I *hate* text
shadow and rarely use it. Why? Because I can't change the colour (since it
colours itself based on the background fill) and more importantly, I can't
change the _distance_ of the shadow from the text. Sometimes, I want more
than a 1 pixel shadow or I want it to go in a different direction than down
and to the right.
Question now is: is this a bug, a flaw in the 07 program (ie. conflict
between "subtitle" and "body text" autolayouts) or just the new normal?