Add one word at a time to a slide

- [Jess] My name is Jess Stratton, and welcome to PowerPoint Tips Weekly. It can be confusing to get multiple lines of text to animate on a slide. It seems like it should be something that can be done fairly quickly and easily, and it can. You don't even need multiple animations, or bullets for that matter. Let's get started by inserting some text. I'll do that by changing to the Insert ribbon tab, clicking Text Box, and getting started. I'm going to put my text on multiple lines.

All right, some basic text. I'll make it a little bit bigger so that we can see it. And here's our text on a slide. Now these aren't bullets. I would like each line to appear one-by-one. To get started, we're going to change to the Animations ribbon tab. I don't have the click-and-drag to highlight all my text. All I need to do is make sure that the text box itself is selected.

I'll change to the Animations tab. I can choose an animation. In this case I'll choose Fade. And here's the key. Under Effect Options, right now it defaults to all these three lines of text, it's treating it as one object. However, I'm going to choose By Paragraph. That means every time I hit the Enter key on my keyboard, it thinks it's a new paragraph. So now, we'll have, three separate lines.

If I want to customize the timing of that, maybe make it a little more slow for dramatic purposes, I can highlight the text box again, and I'll click Animation Pane. Here's where I can get some more options. I'll click the down arrow next to my animation and choose Effect Options. We'll change to the Timing tab, and here's where I can set the duration. I'll set this to two seconds.

You'll notice that this Duration is also up here on the top right-hand side of the screen. However, it's important to know that this dialogue box does exist because there are a lot of great options in here. I'll click OK, and now we'll get to see it, just as it should be. Once again, my name is Jess Stratton, and this has been PowerPoint Tips Weekly.