ActionButton animation inconsistent

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mark Tangard
  • Start date Start date
M

Mark Tangard

Hi gang,

Slide 1 contains a grid of hyperlinks pointing to other slides in the
file. On each of the target slides, the text is supposed to enter via
"Zoom from Bottom," and appear immediately ("Automatic" is checked).

And they do. Until they don't. All such slides are set up with
identical parameters for the animation, but not all of them appear with
the animation. And there's a pattern:

I haven't yet filled in the text on all the target slides; some of them
contain just a word of dummy text, e.g., "Link4." When I click the
hyperlink pointing to any of those slides, the effect ALWAYS occurs.
When I click the others (links to slides whose text I *have* entered),
typically the first 1 or 2 links clicked produce the animation, but
after that the animation DOESN'T show for any of the links (though the
text does appear). And the ONLY difference I know of between the slides
with the dummy text and the slides with the actual, new, pasted text is
that I typed the dummy text in manually, but on the others I'm pasting
the text, from a Word doc.

Is that a bad thing? Is there something I'm not doing while pasting?
Is there a known weakness as to frequency with that particular
animation? (To be sure I'm not pasting any funny stuff, I paste this
text as 'unformatted,' using Edit-> PasteSpecial.) What could be
causing this and how can I set it right? I need to have the effect
happen on each of the target slides.

TIA!!!
 
Hi Mark,

A couple of things to check:

1) It's probably a combination of being a cranky, suspicious old geezer, but I
mistrust copying text from Word into PPT. Or maybe it's that it's bitten me
before? Anyhow, try copying the text into Notepad, then copy from there into
PPT.

2) You might be running into a variation of the "animations only play once"
oddity. That is, once the animation on a slide's played, PowerPoint figures
"You've had your fun, too much motion will make you seasick and we'll not have
any barfing on the keyboard on MY watch." So it doesn't play the animation
when you revisit the slide, other than directly from the previous slide.

So the trick is to link to a blank slide you've inserted immediately before the
one with animation and set that slide's transition time to 0 so it immediately
shoots along to the next slide.

Hey, it's cheap, whether it's a fix or not. Worth a shot. ;-)
 
Hi Steve,

Interesting. I actually had the same suspicion (being pretty cranky,
suspicious, and old myself) but dismissed it. Will check it out before
trying the extra-slide idea. Do you think I need brand-new placeholders
on those slides first? That is, is it likely that pasting from Word
deposits additional/invisible cooties on the slide, so that merely
deleting the text wouldn't purify it?
 
Mark,
Would it possible to send me a sample presentation where you can reproduce
the described issue? I would be happy to take a look.
Email: Shyam at MVPs dot org
 
Interesting. I actually had the same suspicion (being pretty cranky,
suspicious, and old myself) but dismissed it. Will check it out before
trying the extra-slide idea. Do you think I need brand-new placeholders
on those slides first? That is, is it likely that pasting from Word
deposits additional/invisible cooties on the slide, so that merely
deleting the text wouldn't purify it?
Click to expand...

Deleting ALL the text from the placeholder *should* do it. But that "suspicious old
coot" thing kicks in and says "yeah, but ...". Still. It should do it.
 
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