Animation Events in PowerPoint 2016 for Windows

Once you add animation to any slide object, you can play the animation in Slide Show view by clicking your mouse cursor or pressing the Spacebar key on your keyboard. Another option is to use a button on a presentation remote. Each of these options advances one animation at a time, or may even take you to the subsequent slide. While this approach works for slides that have an animation or two, you will quickly realize that this is certainly not the way to go if your slides have tens of animations or more. If you add that many animations to any slide, you probably want your animations to be automatically sequenced, and that's exactly where PowerPoint's animation events can help.

PowerPoint supports three types of animation events:

1. On Click

This is the default animation event for any animation applied to a slide object. This animation can be played by either clicking the left (or default) mouse button, pressing the Spacebar key, by clicking the Right Arrow button on the keyboard, or activating a specific button on a presentation remote control.

PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts

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Explore our PowerPoint Keyboard Shortcuts and Sequences Ebook that is updated for all PowerPoint versions.

2. With Previous

This animation event is set to play simultaneously with any previous animation(s) listed on the Animation Task Pane for the same slide. If there are no previous animations on the slide, this animation plays immediately after the slide transition.

3. After Previous

This animation event plays instantly after a previous animation finishes playing on a slide. If there are no previous animations on the slide, this animation plays immediately after the slide transition.

1. Select the slide object that has an animation applied. To learn how to apply animation, refer to our Adding an Animation in PowerPoint 2016 tutorial.
2. With the slide object still selected, access the Animations tab of the Ribbon, and locate the Start box, as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 1, below.
3. 
   Figure 1: Start box within the Animations tab
3. Now, click the down-arrow next to the Start box to open the Animation Events drop-down list, as shown in Figure 2, below.
4. 
   Figure 2: Animation events drop-down list
4. Choose any animation event based on your requirement for the selected animation. Test the animation by playing the slide.
5. Save your presentation often.