Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by PowerPoint MVP Glenna Shaw as part of the MVP Award Program Blog's "MVPs for Office 2010" series. Glenna Shaw has over 14 years of experience creating data visualizations in the form of presentations, project management tools, dashboards, demos, prototypes and system user interfaces. She is a Certified Project Management Professional and an active member of the PowerPoint Community. Also known as the PowerPoint Magician, Glenna is the author of the popular PowerPak for PowerPoint series, an innovative collection of lesson and educational game templates.
My MVP brother, Glen Millar, can frequently be heard to say how much he doesn’t like transitions. So I, like any true sibling, love them and always have. So much so I even wrote articles about how to fake 3D transitions in PowerPoint 2003, create a scrolling effect in PowerPoint 2007 and create pan and zoom effects in PowerPoint. With the release of PowerPoint 2010, I was thrilled to see I no longer need to fake it. My very favorite new feature is that transitions play correctly in all directions. You now have the ability to move forward and backward through your slideshow and your slides will transition appropriately. No more need for extra slides to compensate.
I’m especially fond of the new Dynamic Content transitions. When PowerPoint 2010 was first released I found them a little confusing and even complained that they weren’t really transitions but full slide animations. That was before fellow MVP Troy Chollar showed me a slide he had created using a Dynamic Content transition. Wow, was I hooked!
Dynamic Content transitions are essentially a two for the price of one transition. The background does a fade transition and the content changes simultaneously using the transition you choose. This means if your background is the same on your slides it will look as if your content moves independently on and off the screen.
There are seven options for Dynamic Content; Pan, Ferris Wheel, Conveyor, Rotate, Window, Orbit and Fly Through. With a little experimentation of the options for direction and timing you can create something really special.
I recently had a friend deliver a keynote presentation on Cloud Computing at a major conference. By using Dynamic Content transitions and alternating two cloud backgrounds I created a presentation that looked as if his content tumbled and flew through the clouds. The result was light and airy and perfectly suited to his topic.
I’ve put together a presentation that demonstrates some of the transitions in PowerPoint 2010. You can download it from my public SkyDrive. You’ll notice it’s a zip file. This is to force you to download it and play it in PowerPoint 2010. Sadly, transitions do not play in the PowerPoint Web Apps.
All the transitions in PowerPoint 2010 are pretty spectacular and offer amazing potential for the creative slide show designer. Now if MS would just add a Page Turn transition and remove that bounce from the Pan transition I would be content.