Custom Animations

S

Simon

Hi
I am wondering in someone has any suggestions regarding the following issues:
1) Is there anyway around the 49 custom animation limit per presentation?
2) Is there a way to play an imported sound file from the middle rather than
having to restart it everytime you make a slide edit?
3) Is there a way to embed an imported sound file in PowerPoint so that if
the slide show is sent to someone or downloaded it will include the audio
portion of the presentation?
Thank you in advance for your help
Simon
 
L

Lucy Thomson

Hi Simon

Replies in line:

Simon said:
Hi
I am wondering in someone has any suggestions regarding the following
issues:
1) Is there anyway around the 49 custom animation limit per presentation?

I'm not aware of any limit - are you having an issue?
2) Is there a way to play an imported sound file from the middle rather
than
having to restart it everytime you make a slide edit?

Unfortunately not.
3) Is there a way to embed an imported sound file in PowerPoint so that if
the slide show is sent to someone or downloaded it will include the audio
portion of the presentation?

You can embed .wav files or fool PowerPoint into thinking a .mp3 is a .wav
file using CDex. For more info see here:
Sounds/Movies don't play, images disappear or links break when I move or
email a presentation
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00155.htm
Thank you in advance for your help
Simon

If you need more info be sure to tell us your version :)

Lucy
 
S

Simon

Lucy
Thank you for your response
1) I am using Powerpoint 2002 SP3, but I loaded the presentation to my
Powerpoint 2007 and saw the same limitation which is that althought the
presentation allows me to create more than 49 custom animations, beyond the
49th animation it does not play during the slideshow. It is a little
cumbersome, but you can simulate this by creating a slideshow with 52 custom
animations and you will see it stop animating at #49. I really could use
help with overcoming this issue. Thanks.

2) It is a real shame, something MS might want to change since starting from
the start each time you are editing or timing a slide is cumbersome

3) I will take a look into the sound embedding link you sent me, but from
what I understand from a cusory read is that if the file is greater than
50000 KB ot will be hard to embed. I will follow up with you if I have
further questions.

Thanks again for your guidance

Simon
 
L

Lucy Thomson

Simon said:
Lucy
Thank you for your response
1) I am using Powerpoint 2002 SP3, but I loaded the presentation to my
Powerpoint 2007 and saw the same limitation which is that althought the
presentation allows me to create more than 49 custom animations, beyond
the
49th animation it does not play during the slideshow. It is a little
cumbersome, but you can simulate this by creating a slideshow with 52
custom
animations and you will see it stop animating at #49. I really could use
help with overcoming this issue. Thanks.

I'm not seeing that here. I drew a rectangle in 2003 and added a peek in
animation, set it to 'after previous' then ctrl+d'ed (duplicate) 27 times,
then copied all these boxes again, giving me 56 boxes with animation on a
single slide. This worked fine in edit and slide show mode in both 2003 and
2007. Can you give more detail about the animations you are adding?
2) It is a real shame, something MS might want to change since starting
from
the start each time you are editing or timing a slide is cumbersome

Oh, I hear you. I try to break my slide up as much as possible to overcome
this issue but it's a real PITA.
3) I will take a look into the sound embedding link you sent me, but from
what I understand from a cusory read is that if the file is greater than
50000 KB ot will be hard to embed. I will follow up with you if I have
further questions.

But 50,000K is a big file - how big is the file you want to embed? And how
are you wanting to send it to poeple? If it's on a CD/thumbdrive then you
don't need to embed (just use the package for CD option). If it's via email
please don't send it to me ;-)
Thanks again for your guidance

You're welcome. Please be as specific as you can be - remember we can't see
your presentation or your vision and often problems can have alternative
solutions if we know the full picture...

Lucy
 
J

John Wilson

So when do you change your name to Sheila?

For the record I've seen shows with literally hundreds (probably thousands)
of animations. Thinking you might mean 49 on the same shape I created a slide
with 100 animations all on the same shape (I used a macro to write them!)

It ran just fine.
--
john ATSIGN PPTAlchemy.co.uk
Custom vba coding and PPT Makeovers
Free PPT Hints, Tips and Tutorials
http://www.pptalchemy.co.uk/powerpoint_hints_and_tips_tutorials.html
PPTLive Atlanta 2009
 
S

Simon

Lucy
Thank you
1) You were right. I was able to place more than 49 custom animations into
the slideshow. There seems to have been a quirk with the text boxes I was
trying to animate. When I created an animation with these boxes, powerpoint
separated the text from the box and assigned the custom animation to each
one. Once I grouped the problematic text boxes, they started to behave. Who
knows!
3) I created the slideshow with the orignal wave files and as you noted the
file became very cumbersome when I embedded the wav files. I used the
instructions that you had suggested to compress the files to MP3 and then
give them a WAV name to allow them to be embedded in the powerpoint document.
Something strange happened when I used the new WAV files. The original wave
files started playing immediately, but the new compressed wave files had a
delay in playing the sound (meaning they started right away with the slide,
but the sound only started 2-3 seconds later). The larger the original WAV
file the more pronounced the delay. It was maneagable with the smaller
files, but the larger files are having a 2-3 second delay in starting which
is throwing the whole animation sequence off. I am assuming that this has
something to do with Powerpoint decoding the sound, but I wanted your input
on the matter. Is there any solution to this problem? As an alternative, is
there a way to leave the original WAV files and then compress the powerpoint
document instead? Unfortuantely this sound compression issue threw a monkey
wrench into the mix, since the whole presentation was done and working until
I embedded the new sound files. As you can imagine, it is very frustrating.
Thank you again in advance for your help.
Simon
 
L

Lucy Thomson

Hi Simon

Glad to hear you got the custom animation thing sorted out. As for the sound
file, I'm afraid I don't have much experience with the whole 'fooling ppt
into thinking an mp3 is a wav' thing so I don't have any suggestions for you
as to why it's happening - someone else might though. If you want to go back
to the original wav then there are a couple of 3rd party compressors that
have good reputations:
PPTools Optimizer http://www.pptools.com
NXPowerLite http://www.nxpowerlite.com

Lucy

--
Lucy Thomson
PowerPoint MVP
MOS Master Instructor
www.aneasiertomorrow.com.au
 
S

Simon

Thank you for your response
The compression programs don't really help with sound files. They are
focused on embedded pictures and objects. In the end this is what I did. I
saved the sound files at the lowest quality WAV format that didn't degrade
the sound quality. That helped cut the size of the powerpoint file to 25% of
what it had started at. After that I opened a new powerpoint document and
embedded the original file as an object (show) in the new document and for
some reason that knocked another 20-30% off the file size. The file is still
very large, but now manageable to the point where I was able to upload it to
a server and have people view it as a download.
 

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