Animating ink

[Guest]

Does MS Office 2003 Powerpoint allow the animation of ink (produced on a tablet pc, say)?

Thanks
--Peter

 

[Sonia]

Not sure what you mean. Since annotations are saved as images, you can
probably animate them, though I haven't found a reason to.

 

[Guest]

Sorry, my question was not very specific. I am trying to produce slides with lots of mathematical calculations (for a calculus class), and would like to display them line-by-line for teaching purposes. Typing such formulas in Equation Editor 3.0 is cumbersome, and I thought my tablet PC would allow me write by hand on slides. Well, in Office 2003 this seems to be integrated fairly nicely now, but so far, whenever I put ink on a slide, it is visible as soon as a slide appears. I would like my formulas to behave like typed bullet points, where it is easy to animate them. This helps focus students attention on the step that is currently being discussed.

The annotation feature is of course also useful, but it requires formulas to be written out during the presentation, which makes it difficult to prepare longer calculations.

Thanks for any advice. From other posts I gather that perhaps I have to write each line in a textbox (which doesn't sound as easy as with typed bullet points, but I guess ink and type are still quite far from interchangable even in XP for tablet PCs).

Reagrds,
Peter

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

See if the picture toolbar's crop tool allows you to crop the ink shape.
If so, you could duplicate the slide with the full equation then crop it
successively smaller on each slide (working from end to beginning of the
build sequence).

Sorry, my question was not very specific. I am trying to produce slides

with lots of mathematical calculations (for a calculus class), and would
like to display them line-by-line for teaching purposes. Typing such
formulas in Equation Editor 3.0 is cumbersome, and I thought my tablet PC
would allow me write by hand on slides. Well, in Office 2003 this seems to
be integrated fairly nicely now, but so far, whenever I put ink on a slide,
it is visible as soon as a slide appears. I would like my formulas to behave
like typed bullet points, where it is easy to animate them. This helps focus
students attention on the step that is currently being discussed.

The annotation feature is of course also useful, but it requires formulas

to be written out during the presentation, which makes it difficult to
prepare longer calculations.

Thanks for any advice. From other posts I gather that perhaps I have to

write each line in a textbox (which doesn't sound as easy as with typed
bullet points, but I guess ink and type are still quite far from
interchangable even in XP for tablet PCs).

 

[John Langhans [MSFT]]

Hello,

PowerPoint does not have the specific capability that you are looking for.
Currently Ink is treated as an Office Drawing object with regards to the
animation features in PowerPoint. There's no special capability in
PowerPoint to understand that this type of drawing object consists of pen
strokes or how to animate these strokes separately.

As a workaround you can do the following (which destroys the "inkness" of
the ink)

1) Select the ink objects
2) Edit -> Cut
3) Edit -> Paste Special .... Picture (Enhanced Metafile)
4) Draw -> Ungroup
5) Repeat step 4 until Ungroup command is no longer available.

Now each individual "stroke" can be animated individually.

If you (or anyone else reading this message) have some suggestions about
whether (and how)PowerPoint should understand and animate ink, don't forget
to send your feedback to Microsoft at:

http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

As with all product suggestions, it's important that you not just state
your wish but also why it is important to you that your product suggestion
be implemented by Microsoft. Microsoft receives thousands of product
suggestions every day and we read each one but, in any given product
development cycle, there are only sufficient resources to address the ones
that are most important to our customers so take the extra time to state
your case as clearly and completely as possible.

IMPORTANT: Each submission should be a single suggestion (not a list of
suggestions)

John Langhans

Supportability Program Manager
Microsoft Office PowerPoint for Windows
Microsoft Office Picture Manager for Windows

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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