If you never use desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher, Corel Draw, or Adobe InDesign, you may not be familiar with using objects and layers to create documents for print or screen. Unlike popular programs such as Word and Excel, PowerPoint’s entire design principle revolves around objects to create your presentation. Just like a desktop publisher, each element in a PowerPoint presentation represents an object that can be positioned without disturbing other objects. These objects include text, images, videos, and any other elements present in your PowerPoint files.
Since each object is its own element, you can layer objects to get your presentation to look exactly as you want. Read on to learn why and how to layer objects in a PowerPoint presentation. Why Layer Objects? There are two main reasons you may want to layer objects in a PowerPoint presentation. First, layering objects gives you the freedom to arrange your presentation in any layout that you desire. Rather than working in a linear fashion as with a word processor, you can place and layer objects all you want.
If you have a dozen animated objects — each of them assigned some weird PowerPoint name, such as Rectangle 35 or Autoshape 12 — it is a gift from the universe to be able to rename these objects so you can tell them apart in the Animation task pane.
Second, layering lets you take advantage of all of the white space in your presentation. Text boxes in particular take up a lot of room. By layering objects, you can use all of the space on a slide without changing the position of other objects. Layering Objects in PowerPoint Suppose you add four boxes to your PowerPoint presentation; first a red one, then green, then blue, then yellow. Each box represents an object.
When you add a new object to a PowerPoint presentation, the application automatically places the newest objects on top of older objects. If you add the boxes in the order mentioned above, the layering of the objects will look like this. Notice that the newest box (yellow) is on top of the others. Using PowerPoint’s layering function, you can layer these objects in any order. To layer the objects differently from the default order, begin by clicking on the Home tab on the Ribbon and locating the section titled Drawing. In the Drawing section, locate and click on the button titled Arrange.
Notice that on the menu that pops up, there are four options titled:. Bring to Front. Send to Back. Bring Forward. Send Backward With these commands, you can layer objects in PowerPoint any way you want. Notice, however that the menu items are grayed out; you can’t use them unless you first make an object active by clicking on it before you click on the Arrange button.
As an example, let’s arrange the yellow box on top to a different layer. Begin by clicking on the yellow box to make it the active object.
Then, click on the Arrange button and select Send Backward from the menu. Notice that now the yellow box has moved back one layer to be between the blue box and the green box.
Now select the blue box and this time select Send to Back from the Arrange menu. Notice that now the blue box occupies the lowest level and is now behind the yellow, green, and red boxes. Using the four arrange functions on the Arrange button, you can choose whether an object moves one level up or down or all the way to the highest or lowest level. It may take some getting used to working with layers in PowerPoint, but the menu system is quite intuitive. Use the Send Back and Bring Forward commands to move an object one layer back or forward and use the Send to Back and Bring to Forward commands to move an object all the way to the front or back of the layering order.
You can also simply right-click on the object and choose those options from the context menu as shown below. In addition, it’s worth noting that you can also make your layers fully transparent or semi-transparent, which can result in some cool effects. In our little example, I made the yellow layer semi-transparent and then added some text to the green box. You can make a layer transparent by right-clicking on it and then clicking on the Style button.
You’ll see a bunch of boxes with different colors and styles. Towards the middle/bottom, you’ll find the options for transparent and semi-transparent. There is virtually no limit to the number of layers the objects on a PowerPoint slide can occupy. However, to keep things neat and simple for your audience, consider using no more layers than you need on a single slide.
Use too many layers and you risk making too complicated a slide to follow. Experiment with arranging and layering objects in PowerPoint and you can reclaim unused white space to create a more visually appealing PowerPoint presentation.
The best-kept secret of modern versions of PowerPoint? That’s a no-brainer, as I experience it almost every time I interact with users. When I am brought into an organization to consult on presentation skills, most in the room don’t know about it. When I give webinars, I can practically hear their oohs and aahs when I show it. And at the Presentation Summit, where 200 of the most earnest and passionate presentation professionals gather each year, I routinely get many dozens of users in a room producing a collective gasp. I refer to the Selection and Visibility Pane, introduced in Version 2007 and largely overlooked by most users of 2007, 2010, and probably by the few who have tested the waters with 2013.
I attribute this to two things: 1) This function doesn’t actually create anything; and 2) With lower-resolution displays, the icon shrinks to the size of a pinhead and most don’t even see it. Let’s reverse this discouraging trend right now, shall we? The S&V task pane addresses several of the most frustrating aspects of the software over the last decade. It deserves your undying love and devotion. Here are three big reasons why. Select Objects on a Crowded Slide The simplest virtue of S&V is the ease it affords you in selecting objects that are hard to reach with a mouse or even invisible to you.
When objects overlap one another, reaching the ones on the bottom of the pile has traditionally required contortions, such as temporarily cutting or moving the ones on top or pressing Tab until you think the selection handles maybe kinda sorta are around the desired object. Those headaches are all in your rearview mirror now, as the figure above shows.
With S&V, you can select objects by clicking on their names in the task pane, bringing much-needed sanity to what should be a menial task. Once selected, you can do anything to an object that you otherwise would have. As I said earlier, this pane doesn’t really do anything except make it easier for you to do what you want. Rename objects The screen image above might look unusual to you because you had never laid eyes on S&V before, but there is another cause for a raised eyebrow: Circle in the front? Circle in the back? Where did those names come from?
Most of you know what kind of names PowerPoint assigns to objects because you have been scratching your heads over them for the better part of a decade. Rectangle 23TextBox 9AutoShape 34. Historically, PowerPoint has been maddeningly obtuse in its naming scheme and you’ve never been able to do anything about it except curse. But with S&V, you can assign names to your objects that actually make sense. You’d probably do better than Circle in the middle, and that’s the point: you get to decide what to call your objects. Renaming objects becomes more than just a cute screenshot opportunity when you have complex animation to create. PowerPoint’s obtuse object names are duplicated in the Animation task pane and with ambitious animation needs, you could find yourself drowning in a sea of obtusity.
With Rectangle 23, 24, and 25, which one enters first, which one moves to the center of the slide, and which one fades away? Thanks to S&V, you can do much better. You can name objects according to their appearance or purpose and have a much easier time creating animations for them. Case in Point: Solavie, the skin care product that offers formulations for six different Earthly environments. To highlight these formulations, the six icons in the lower-right corner move and morph into the six photos across the top, after which each string of text cascades in. So lots of identical shapes doing similar things, one after the other – imagine pulling that off with typical PowerPoint names.
But the image above shows how powerful object renaming can be. Each object is named according to its environment type, making the animation process orders of magnitude easier.
Hide and Unhide Sometimes it is not enough to be able to name objects. Sometimes you just have to get them the heck out of the way. When you are working on the final parts of a 45-second animation, it becomes incredibly tedious to have to start from the beginning each time you want to test it. You need to be able to start from the middle or near the end. Prior to S&V, if you needed to temporarily remove an object, you had to cut objects to the Clipboard and work quickly before you accidentally send something else there. Or work up some bizarre strategy of duplicating a slide, doing your business there, then moving those objects back to the original slide. Now we have an elegant and simple solution: make an object invisible.
The screen image above shows the beauty and the genius of hiding objects, as the tail end of the Solavie animation gets the attention that it deserves. As you can see, when you hide an object, it leaves the animation stream, making late-stage testing a piece of cake. Here, just the final two environment types are still visible. The earlier four are still there, just temporarily hidden. Access Selection & Visibility lives on the Home ribbon in the Editing group. PowerPoint ribbons have a bad habit of changing right when you might want something on them, and that contributes to the anonymity of a small icon that is there one minute and gone the next. Indeed, there is no way to predict when you might want to use S&V.
Creating, inserting, designing, animating – using S&V cuts across all contexts of PowerPoint operation. So it’s helpful to know about its keyboard shortcut of Alt+F10. There’s no mnemonic that you can apply to that shortcut – it’s as easy to forget as the function it belongs to. So you just have to commit it to memory. When you’re in the throes of creation, just press Alt+F10. Pretty good chance that little task pane will come in handy. This was the one shining thing that made my PC experience somewhat tolerable.
I used this feature endlessly creating complex animations for presentations when I was struggling to get even the simplest tasks done while stuck using a PC, using years-old software. After almost two years in exile my company finally agreed to put me on a Mac and I was excited to jump into my first PPT project back on a Mac. However I was extremely dismayed to see that for some reason Microsoft saw fit to omit this feature from the Mac version of PPT. Once again Microsoft’s backward logic and reverse thinking haunts me. I appreciate your thoughts, Charles. Here is why I disagree: If objects are overlapping, it is much easier to pick one out in the Selection Pane than on the slide.
If you have a dozen animated objects — each of them assigned some weird PowerPoint name, such as Rectangle 35 or Autoshape 12 — it is a gift from the universe to be able to rename these objects so you can tell them apart in the Animation task pane. I do agree that the tool can/should evolve and allow you to sort and more easily multi select.
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