Making clean proofs of slides with complex animations

There’s a workaround for that.

Note to reader: There’s ALWAYS a workaround.

If you’re like me, you love to enhance your story with appro­pri­ate ani­ma­tion within Pow­er­Point. Both sim­ple and com­plex ani­ma­tions can bring the infor­ma­tion pre­sented to life and under­stand­able in a way that sta­tic con­tent can’t always do. But there’s the per­pet­ual prob­lem of dis­sem­i­nat­ing that pre­sen­ta­tion after­wards with­out caus­ing your­self the extra work of either show­ing and hid­ing slides when you cre­ate pdfs, or rebuild­ing them altogether.

There’s a pretty sim­ple trick to hav­ing all of that over­lap­ping ani­mated con­tent on the slide AND mak­ing that same slide clean and read­able for pdf out­put or print­ing. And it means you add 2 more ani­ma­tions and even more over­lap­ping con­tent to your slide. Let’s go through this step by step.

Let’s start with your animated slide.

Under the hood, it really looks like this:

In real­ity, you want the pdf and print outs to look like the slide when the ani­ma­tion ended:

So how do we make that happen?

There are a few steps to take here.

1. Dupli­cate your ani­mated slide.
2. On this sec­ond slide, move all objects to their final rest­ing place after the ani­ma­tion is done.
3. Save this slide as a PNG
4. Delete the sec­ond slide
5. Insert the PNG you just made onto the orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion slide

At this point, you really want to make use of your selec­tion pane. Make sure all of the objects on your slide have names that make sense. For the PNG I just pasted onto this slide, I’ve renamed it “for print only.”

Fan­tas­tic! It looks like you want it to for print! But now it’s in the way of the ani­ma­tion. Oh man. Well, there’s an easy fix for it.

With the PNG selected, do the following:

1. Add ani­ma­tion: appear with previous
2. Add ani­ma­tion: dis­ap­pear with previous
3. Bump those two ani­ma­tions to occur first.

Voila! Now you have a slide that ani­mates exactly how you want it to in pre­sen­ta­tion mode AND prints cleanly for proofs or handouts!