PowerPoint Triggers: Making Interactive Presentation

Using PowerPoint triggers allows you to create an interactive presentation with a personalised experience for your audience.

How many times have you heard that the key in the presentation is the presenter, and not his slides? Whenever it came to a traditional presentation, right? However, in the case of an interactive presentation, oratorical and leadership skills of the presenter are useless, because the presenter is abcense. Now each user in front of his computer becomes both a listener and a leader.

If you are developing an interactive presentation, then you need to decide how the presentation program will react if:

1. the audience’s reaction is mouse clicks rather than applause or cues?
2. the user wants to change the planned presentation sequence?
3. a bored or tired viewer disorderly clicks on the slide for fun?

Don’t doubt, we have the answer to the questions asked!

A properly configured PowerPoint triggers and hyperlinks provide your presentation interactivity.

There is already an article on our blog about using hyperlinks to creating PowerPoint presentations, so below we’ll talk about how to create an interactive presentation using PowerPoint triggers.

Interactive Presentation Slide Example with PowerPoint Triggers

We made one slide of an interactive presentation and a short video to show how it works. This is probably the easiest way to get started.

This slide is made using PowerPoint triggers and contains all the elements for a successful interactive presentation. Why don’t we look inside?

We used the photo from the Hubble telescope site to make this mesmerizing space background. Everything is simple here!

Interactive Presentation:
PowerPoint Triggers & Hyperlinks

We placed triggers and hyperlinks in this layer. The viewer sees them as regular buttons:

• a click on the trigger launches the animation effect associated with this trigger,
  

  

• and a click on the hyperlink initiates a transition to some other presentation slide associated with this hyperlink.
  

  

Animated Elements

The ‘engine room’ layer of our interactive slide is between the background and triggers layers. Everything moves here, responding to commands from the control cabin. Watch it or you will be smashed! 🙂

We put here three rectangular shapes and attached their animations to clicking three buttons containing answers options. And to make this composition work as it should we used:

• the mask to hide the shapes behind it (read our blog post on how to use PowerPoint animation with mask);
• Fly In effect with the appropriate trigger so that the shape appears by sliding from left to right;
• Fly Out effect with the same trigger so that the shape disappears by sliding from right to left with a 2.5 second delay after the previous animation.

It would seem that everything is ready, right? But no!

How to Protect Interactive Presentation

We need the slide always responds correctly to the viewer’s clicks.

First, in PowerPoint’s defaults a pointless click queues the next slide. This means if the viewer clicks past the answer option, then PowerPoint will change the slide. To avoid this problem, go to the Transitions tab and disable the On Mouse Click checkbox in the Timing group.

Secondly, see the slide’s behaves when the viewer disorderly clicks the answer options:

Who will like this chaos, right? Well, let’s to protect our slide also from a curious or bored user. To do this we’ll:

1. add to it a transparent protective screen the same size as the area with the answers;
2. change the animation effects sequence by adding:
   • animation of the appearance of this screen when you click on an answer option;
   • and the animation of the screen’s disappearance as the animation effect’s completion.

Look, we made the protective screen semitransparent so its appearance and disappearance became noticeable in this video:

Now it’s all! 🙂