Feature Preview: Fill in the Blank Animation

I have observed that fill-in-the-blank text and outlines are a fairly common way to present information by pastors. Presenting a fill-in-the blank slide is one in which the "blanks" are left empty with an underline and populated on later slides. Some hearty presentation designers have attempted to do this using Slide Show Builder, mostly with frustrating results. Attempting this with the current version of SongShow Plus requires using multiple text objects on a slide, lining them up carefully, then hoping that the alignment carries over to the larger screen format -- it rarely does. The text sizing mechanism used by SongShow Plus simply doesn't make this approach practical.

The next edition of SongShow Plus solves this problem by providing support for animating fill-in-the-blanks. 

Take the the following slide as an example.



Let's say that we want to animate each of the words that are in upper case. The first step we take is to edit the text, then underline each of these words, like this:



Next, we select the Fade Entrance Animation (but any animation can be used):



After that, we select the menu command Animate > Each Underlined Text.



This is a new menu command and it specifies that underlined text is to be animated individually. Normally in a text block like this, each of the bullet points would be animated. With this new option the underlined text is animated instead.

Now, when presenting and stepping through this slide, it will look something like this:









And so on...

This new feature will be very handy for building fill-in-the-blank slides.

Note: This outline was derived from an example from www.sermoncentral.com and the background image is from www.shiftworship.com.

(BE275)

Comments: