Focusing your audience with emphasis effects and shapes

I'm often struck when I'm watching a presentation, that the presenter is in the middle of doing a football diagram of some kind to point out some data. And it's not looking all that good, and they knew from the beginning that they wanted to highlight that data. So why didn't they animate it? You know what I mean. There's tools built in here that I can switch to a pen. I can even decide that I want to change my ink color so that I can say, you know I'd like to say something here about what's going on in the central U.S. look how awful that looks.

Or, I might choose a beautiful blue. And make an arrow and say see, I want you to look at this. None of this is easy, and it particularly isn't easy if you're using a device you are not familiar with. So why in the world would we do this? There has to be a better way. No I don't think I want to keep these ink annotations at all. So let's go back to our presentation and there are a couple of things we know we want to highlight. For example, our inverter sales in Europe. The story is that they still lag the US sales. Now, we've animated this.

We can go to the Animations tab and open the Animation pane. Even before we do, we notice that this is all animated. But this is the initial animation of the chart. This is how it comes in. And then I know I'm going to want to go back and point to Europe in some way just to take a look at only Europe. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to select, and it doesn't really matter much, what I select in this case. Because, when I add the animation effect, it's going to add it to the entire chart.

But I'm going to say that I want to see some emphasis effects. And not every emphasis effect is available in a chart. Not every one is available in a 3D chart. But I could do something like Pulse. Notice that it's pulsing each of these items in turn, each individual data point, it's like that's interesting. So if I add that animation effect, that pulsing shown here in yellow, is actually pulsing each of these items one at a time.

What I want to know is when it pulsing the last three items, 24, 25 and 26. Because, I don't need any of the others. I don't need it to pulse the background, I don't need it to pulse anything except my last three data elements. So, I'm going to delete all of these others. Now let's take a look at what this slide looks like. I can preview, but the preview tends to go by pretty quickly. I prefer to hold Shift and hit F5. So here comes my chart.

I'm simply pressing Enter, or clicking in order to advance each of the data elements. And then, I say, you know but Inverter sales in Europe are still lagging US sales. There we go. There's my emphasis. That's not bad. It's going to make it easy for people to see. Now, I could choose something different. I could choose Spin, or Teeter, or Grow or Shrink. You can look at all of those if you wish, but this is good enough for what I'd like to be able to do.

Let's take a look at some other options for saying, hey, here's the data I want you to pay attention to. While you were gone, I animated this chart. And I simply added a basic animation here. It's a wipe, and it's a wipe up effect, because the chart grows up, so let's see what this looks like. Shift F5, press Enter once, there's our background and legend. One.

Two, three, four. Sales of larger panels continue to dominate. What do I mean by that? Do I mean simply the 220 watt or the 220 and 230 watt? I have some choices here, and so one choice is simply to add some kind of a shape like an arrow and point to the two of those. To say exactly what I mean. If I want to do that, I can choose Insert > Shapes. Now, I can use thin arrows, but I tend to use an arrow that's a little bit bulkier, and you have a whole lot of choices of different block arrows down here.

I'm going to choose this arrow. It's a down arrow. And I'm going to create two of them. There's one, and I can do Ctrl+C to copy, Ctrl+V to paste, and get another one just like that. And there are my two arrows. Now, if I don't animate them, they'll be there long before the chart shows up. So right now these are living inside my chart, and I'm not allowed to animate them.

So I'm going to go ahead and cut this, I'm going to delete the other. I'm going to click outside my chart. Paste this one back in. There's the second. Now I can animate the two of them and then move them, that's fine. So what kind of an animation do I want? I kind of like them to drop down and point at that data.

So, I'm going to add an entrance effect. So, Float Down works oh, that's kind of nice. Compress, no. Center revolve? No, I like Float Down, so we're going to keep that. Now, these are both animated. Now, I can say that I'd like one to be here. And I'd like the other, to be here.

Might even move this one down just a little bit further. Always use your arrow keys to move those when they're selected. Let's see how this looks. So, here's our background. And I'll be talking about each of these points, our sales of 180 watt panels, 200 watt panels, and so on. But then I'll say, but the larger panels still continue to dominate.

Like it. Good like that. First arrow for the 220 watts can be dropped down just a little tiny bit, but that's not a problem. I can just select it, and drop it down a little bit. So once again, I'm using animation and in this case a shape. To help focus my audience on exactly the point I'm trying to make. Whether you use an animation effect, or you decide to use a shape and animate the shape, make sure that you are being clear with your audience about what data you're looking at, what you mean and what you'd like them to take away from the presentation.