Working in the Animation Menu

If you work a lot with animations, you will be very often in the animation menu. With these hints you will learn how to make your work more effective and how to keep track of it. Check out for Animation companies in Singapore for amazing details.

Tip 1: Change the size of the menu field or shift it

Surely you have often enlarged your animation menu on the left side to the left by dragging the border to the left when the double arrow appears with the left mouse button pressed down.

You can also (firmly) anchor the menu field to one of the other pages. Click in the grey bar next to the name and a fourfold arrow will appear. Of course, you can set it back to the usual page accordingly. There is a very fast variant for this simple step. Double-click in the bar at the top and the menu field jumps to the page where it was last placed.

You can also initialize this moving of the menu field by clicking on the small black triangle at the top and selecting it. But the possibilities shown here are more direct and faster.

Tip 2: Select effects

Click the effect once to select it. You can also select the entire area in between by holding down the mouse button and SHIFT when clicking on a second effect.

If you have selected an effect you can use the combination CTRL + A to select ALL effects. For example, you can easily delete all effects or change the times completely at the same time.

But it doesn’t work if the effects have different durations. For example, automatically halving all animations according to their individual duration in time, i.e. 4.2 becomes 2.1 and 3.0 simultaneously becomes 1.5 seconds, is not possible. You can move one or more selected effects up or down in the order of the effects by holding down the mouse button.

Tip: Often you have created a single effect at the very beginning. But this one is at the end of a perhaps very long list of other effects. Select all effects (see above) and use the CTRL key to select the new effect. Now move all marked effects individually with the mouse or with the arrow button downwards – the new effect will then be at the top.

Tip 3: get to the animation menu faster

You can get to the Menu > Animation Area faster by adding the corresponding icon to the DeepL access bar. Just click on the down right arrow in the DeepL access bar. You can then select these or many other functions.

Tip 4: Printing the Animation Menu

The menu of “Custom animations” is very confusing the more animations there are on your slide – especially if you want to display the “Extended Timeline”. Sometimes you want to document the current status, because you may want to make changes later. A total printout of all contents or an extract of the elements is not possible.

If you have placed your animation area separately in the middle of the slide as described above, make a hard copy. If you place it again in a PPT file, then you can also insert individual notes and print everything at any time. With very extensive animation lists you have to move the bar on the right a little and take several screenshots.

Tip 5: Notes / Place Hardcopy outside the foil

If you want to save paper, etc., there are also the following possible procedures. Place these screenshots to the right of the slide outside in the grey area and only at a given time will these results be printed (separately).

You can also place internal notes on the structure of individual complex effects as text to the right of the slide. This will make it easier for you to build on the first settings at a later point in time.

Tip 6: Using the > Extended Timeline

This “timeline” does not only show you a colored bar of the effect. Move the mouse pointer over the bar at any point and the start and end time will be displayed. Even with a delay, you will see the start time, but with a rounded value (0.75 becomes 0.8).

If you click exactly on the start – or end – line, then you can lengthen or shorten the bar length and thus the effect. Click directly into the bar, then move the bar completely in its current state.

Tip 7: Changing the Object Name of an Effect

One could quote “Many ways lead to Rome” here – because to get into the selection area you have several possibilities.

Start > Arrange > Selection Range or > Drawing Tools > Format > Selection Range or you have already packed an icon into the DeepL access bar and click directly on it.

Not only can you set the visibility of all objects individually, but you can also change the name by clicking directly into a name. After a return, the new name is immediately accepted and displayed in the animation area.

Tip 8: Two menus of the animation area at the same time

With very complex animation sequences, it sometimes happens that you have to jump back and forth between the normal display and the Extended Timeline display. Unfortunately, it does not work to display both displays at the same time (in one presentation).A small help in such a case might be to open the identical presentation in a second window and choose a different display mode for each of the two menus.

Since the anchoring of the animation area to the sides always refers to one presentation, you can create a difference here for clarification. If you reduce the overall view accordingly, both presentations will fit well next to each other. On the left you only see the animation menu (without timeline) and in the right presentation you work (menu with timeline).

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