hi i'm russell and every week on this channel i bring you tips tricks and advice on how to use tech more effectively today i want to show you how to animate bullet points in powerpoint to help focus your listeners attention by fading in and fading out the right way and you can see the previous slides look much better because they draw the viewers attention to what the speaker is actually talking about so let's jump over to the pc and see how it works so here in powerpoint i already have a text box with the bullet points laid out once you have the bullet points in place the next step is to animate them now you need to make sure that the text box is selected as you can see on the screen now then all you need to do is to click fade now we want to configure the settings for this animation to fade out the previous bullet point just a little bit so that we focus the listeners attention on the current point that we're speaking about now there are two places in powerpoint where you can access the effect options for an animation so you'll see here on the ribbon we've got effect options and if i click on that and this changes the sequence for how the object that you have selected animates now we don't want to change this because as you can see each bullet point is appearing one by one and that's exactly how we want this animation to be sequenced now if you make sure that the animation pane is activated if it's not you can just click the animation pane button in the ribbon and you will see the pane appear on the far right of your screen you'll see here that we have the animation already highlighted and if i click the arrow to the right here we've got another option called effect options in this menu now here we have some configuration settings that will allow us to fade out the previous points so what we need to do is change the after animation setting from don't dim to a color now what i want to do is i just want to fade out the previous animation slightly so i'm going to set a color that is similar to the background color of the slide but a little bit different so that that bullet point doesn't completely disappear now you can select from one of the colors that powerpoint offers you in the top row of colors that you can see there or you can select from recently used colors in the second row if you don't see a color that you want to use there then you can click more colors and you can select either any of the standard colors that you see here or you can choose absolutely any color that you would like by using this slider so for instance if i grab hold of the crosshairs i can move around and i can select any color that i want and i can change the intensity by moving this slider up and down now because i have a dark gray background i'm going to select the gray here and i already know what color i want to use and i'm going to select that as my color by clicking on ok and back to the effect tab here you can see that the after animation color has now changed so i'm just going to click ok and you can see now that powerpoint is previewing that animation and we get that effect where the previous point fades out so i'm going to run the animation now so if i click slide show and then i'm going to animate the current slide now in order to get the bullet point to appear i have to press space bar all the forward key on the keyboard or a mouse button and when i come to the next point you see that the previous point has faded out so i can draw my viewer or listeners attention to the point that i'm actually speaking about and that's it it's really simple it's a really effective way to make your powerpoint presentations easier to understand and more memorable so that when your audience walks away they'll actually have in their mind oh yeah i remember that presentation and what that person was talking about so if you like this tip then please give the video a thumbs up and don't forget to subscribe to the channel for similar tips tricks and advice from me every week