Tuesday, May 16, 2006
PowerPoint and the CNN Crawler
I only read the CNN crawler when I am disinterested in their featured news report.
Remember the above sentence when you design a PowerPoint presentation with a CNN-style crawler or a ticker going across the botton of the screen. When you give your audience a crawler to read, you are openly acknowledging that the featured content may be less than riveting.
And in some instances, that may be perfectly acceptable. For example, CNN has a general audience. And while I am interested in fully absorbing some of their headline stories, I could care less about many of the their other news items. But I know that a boring CNN report will be finished in a minute or two -- so I read their crawler during the boring parts.
Adding a crawler or ticker at the bottom of your PowerPoint slide is easy to do...just be careful that you use it appropriately. Here's how you can do it in five steps:
¶ 5/16/2006 01:31:00 PM
I only read the CNN crawler when I am disinterested in their featured news report.
Remember the above sentence when you design a PowerPoint presentation with a CNN-style crawler or a ticker going across the botton of the screen. When you give your audience a crawler to read, you are openly acknowledging that the featured content may be less than riveting.
And in some instances, that may be perfectly acceptable. For example, CNN has a general audience. And while I am interested in fully absorbing some of their headline stories, I could care less about many of the their other news items. But I know that a boring CNN report will be finished in a minute or two -- so I read their crawler during the boring parts.
Adding a crawler or ticker at the bottom of your PowerPoint slide is easy to do...just be careful that you use it appropriately. Here's how you can do it in five steps:
- Position your crawler text at the bottom of your presentation. If you want the text to remain on the slide after it crawls in, place your text on the slide. And if you want the text to disappear after the crawl, place it to the left of the slide.
- Select the crawler text, and then select Slide Show > Custom Animation.
- Click on the Add Effect button from within Custom Animation, then select Entrance > More Effects > Crawl In
- You might want to select Very Slow for in the Speed drop down menu...unless you are designing for a group of speed readers!
- And finally, you can adjust when and how the text crawls in by clicking on the Start drop down menu.
Of course, you'll want to make sure that your PowerPoint background supports a crawler. Just for fun, here is a free PowerPoint background for you to download -- it has the oh-so-popular rounded rectangle corners. It is also the most popular Power Point background color - blue - and includes a white space at the bottom for your crawler text -- or for your logo...
¶ 5/16/2006 01:31:00 PM
