Animating and Building Visio 2007 Diagrams in PowerPoint 2007
You can use the PowerPoint 2007 build features to animate Visio 2007 shapes on your slides. Builds are particularly handy for introducing complex ideas. If you illustrate the concept in Visio 2007, you can display it, one element at a time, in your presentation. PowerPoint 2007 offers two types of builds that you can use with Visio 2007 diagrams, animated builds and sequential slide builds.
In an animated build, you copy elements of a Visio 2007 drawing individually, paste or embed them on a slide, and then animate each element in PowerPoint 2007 to build the drawing, as Figure 13-10 shows. You can even control the way different parts of a drawing appear on a slide, allowing elements to enter the slide from different directions. This technique adds a sense of motion and direction to otherwise static shapes, which you can use to convey a message of change or to introduce visual concepts gradually. (A build can also function as an eye-catcher to keep the audience awake. Not that an audience would ever sleep during your presentation.)
Figure 13-10. An animated build displays elements one at a time on a PowerPoint 2007 slide.
In a sequential slide build, you paste the entire drawing on one slide, ungroup it, then copy and paste parts of the drawing onto successive slides. By moving through consecutive slides, you build the entire drawing sequentially over successive slides without having to animate the elements.
With either technique, the Visio 2007 shapes and diagrams you use in a build cannot be linked objects. You can paste or embed them, but you can’t maintain a link between a diagram used for builds and its original Visio 2007 file.
Creating Diagrams for PowerPoint 2007 Animation
When you want to animate a Visio 2007 shape on a PowerPoint 2007 slide, it’s pretty straightforward: Copy the shape, paste it on the slide, and then use the animation tools in PowerPoint 2007 to make it dance. When you want to animate a larger diagram so that shapes in the diagram appear at different times or with special effects, the technique is somewhat more complicated. You copy each element in the diagram that you want to animate separately. It’s a little easier on the PowerPoint 2007 end if you copy the Visio 2007 sections in the order in which you want to animate them, but it isn’t necessary.
For example, suppose you have a flowchart of a new process that you want to present to your group. Rather than overwhelm your colleagues with the complexity of the process all at once, you want to bring sections of the flowchart onto your slide in a step-by-step fashion as you explain them. To do this, you copy all the shapes in your flowchart that make up step 1, as Figure 13-11 shows. In PowerPoint 2007, you paste the shapes and then repeat for each set of shapes that represent a step. After all the Visio 2007 steps appear on the slide, you use the Animations tab on the Ribbon and then select the Custom Animation command in PowerPoint 2007. Or select Slide Show, Custom Animation in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 97 to set the effects you want, as Figure 13-12 shows. This is the same with later versions prior to 2007.
Figure 13-11. To animate a Visio 2007 diagram so that sections appear one by one in PowerPoint 2007, copy and paste each section you want to animate separately.
Figure 13-12. In PowerPoint 2007, each section you paste appears in the Custom Animation dialog box as a separate Visio 2007 object that you can animate.
