How to Create a Pop-Up in PowerPoint

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Excellent PowerPoint slides emphasize the speaker over the design.
Image Credit: Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images

Telling a story with your PowerPoint presentation engages your audience in the process rather than making them passive recipients of information. Using pop-ups adds drama and intrigue that you can leverage into a narrative arc for your presentation. Animation effects in PowerPoint, when judiciously used, create dynamism; when used wantonly they become a distraction, to the detriment of the overall presentation. Ask yourself, before inserting a pop-up, whether or not it will add something irreplaceable to your presentation.

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Create an Object

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Step 1

Launch PowerPoint -- if you haven't already -- and navigate to the slide where you want to create the pop-up.

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Step 2

Choose the "Insert" tab in the menu bar and select the type of object you want to use for the pop-up. You can use a shape, picture, graph or text box. You can insert text into a shape -- for example a callout shape.

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Step 3

Place and format your object. Ideally the pop-up will maintain the design of the slide, but have enough contrast to be easily noticed when it pops up. When placing the object, put it where you want it to end up at the end of any animation.

Animate the Pop-up

Step 1

Select the object and then navigate to the Animation tab on the menu bar.

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Step 2

Choose "Add Animation" and select your animation from the options. The Fly In, Float In and Zoom animations all offer the effect of the object popping into view. Fly In brings the object in from one side of the slide -- like the bottom. The Float in is similar, but the object fades into view as it moves onto the slide. The Zoom animation makes it appear that the object is appearing from beneath the slide.

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Step 3

Select "Effect Options" to change how the pop-up effect is animated. For example with the Fly In animation, if you want to have the object fly in from the bottom of the screen, you would click the up arrow.

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