Lab 6

In this lab you'll practice using SmartArt, charts, and more advanced animation effects. The lab will not focus on you creating content (e.g., typing up bulleted lists). Be sure to spend your time smartly. You could easily spend the rest of your life perfecting your animations, but I hope that you don't have that much free time.

SmartArt

I'd like you to create 2 slides, each having 1 piece of SmartArt (so, 2 SmartArt pieces total). What you show is up to you, but it should make sense considering the content (the words) and the layout (what kind of SmartArt you're using, such as cycle, pyramid, process, hierarchy, etc). Here are some ideas for concepts that you could show (feel free to make up your own):

Then, completely change the colors/style/look of each piece of SmartArt. Possibly, you may want the colors to match what you are showing.

Charts

Sometimes we want to insert a chart into a presentation. Using PowerPoint (and indirectly Excel), create a new blank slide and insert a chart. You can make up your own data or use the following example data (be sure to choose an appropriate chart type):

Month: Stock Price:
January 4.3
February 2.5
March 2.25
April 4.5

Animation

Now, we'll work on doing some animations. Animations can be distracting, but they can also be very powerful. We'll create a simple, silly animation but then we'll create a second useful animation to help the viewer understand something.


Create 2 new, blank slides. On the first slide, we'll create a simple animation that animates a scene. Make it silly, make it weird, make it fun, so long as it demonstrates that you know how to do more complicated animations in PowerPoint. You'll want to use several pieces of clip art. An example scene, in terms of complexity, might be the following (feel free to make the animations fast, so that you don't spend time waiting for various pieces of clip art to slowly move across the screen):

  1. The sun enters the scene
  2. a penguin enters
  3. a cloud covers the sun
  4. the penguin becomes sad
  5. the cloud leaves
  6. the penguin becomes happy!
  7. the penguin walks away
  8. the sun leaves


Then, change the animations in your scene so that it plays out with out you having to click the mouse button at all.


On the next slide, you'll want to do something more serious, something more useful. Using the drawing tools on the Home tab, create a diagram/figure to explain something. Connect the steps in the process with arrows as appropriate. Change the colors and then, animate the steps. Example processes include (feel free to use your own!):

  • filing taxes (steps include finding a job, making money, paying taxes at each pay check, then at the end of the year, filing taxes, and getting a tax return)
  • eating cheese (milk, curdle, age, eat, etc)
  • some kind of process related to your studies
  • starting a car (check fluid levels, get in car, start car, let it warm up, etc)
  • how 'snail' mail works (e.g., have pictures of a house, a mailbox, a truck, plane, etc, then have a piece of mail clip art move around to each in the right order)

For the purposes of this lab, the animation that helps explain your diagram should use several motion paths.


When you're done, call me over so I can give you credit.