How-to: Informational popups (the i’s) in a PowerPoint deck

I learned something the other day and I thought it would be good to share it. Perhaps you already know how this works, perhaps you even use it already, for me if was a first. It is nothing amazing, just a little gimmick you can use when creating PowerPoint decks. Let me explain.

Decks and tables

I create PowerPoint decks very often, I need to explain topics to customers, PM’s or engineers. Doing so you often create tables to show differences between versions, differences between products. Often the table is organised with one column of categories and then different versions of a product where I show if it complies or not.

Some categories are difficult to capture in one or two words. They need to be explained. On webpages you have a simple “I” icon you could click on and a popup would appear with more information. easy does it.

What, I thought, if I could make that also available in PowerPoint. That would solve my issue where I want to explain a category to someone. Let me show the end result.

When someone clicks on the “I” the popup is opened and the explanation is visible. If they click the “I” again the popup disappears. To make sure they disappear at some point I set a timer for 10 seconds.

Setup

Let me show you how to create this function in PowerPoint. It is fairly simple but very useful I think. First you need to create the “I” button, find something you want the user to click on.

1. Insert “button” for users to click on.
2. Insert your text box with the explanation
3. Open the animation menu
4. Add an “appear” animation to the explanation box
5. Add an “disappear” animation to the explanation box.

No it is time to connect things together. Click on the first one, the one that make the box appear. Select “on-click” in the timing section and select the “button” in the trigger section.

Now when you click it, it will popup. I also wanted it to move out, clicked or after a certain time. To do that, click on the second entry, the disappear one.

Select “with previous” in the timing section and set a delay of 10 seconds (or whatever you like) and select the “button” in the trigger section. This will make it disappear in 10 seconds or when clicked.

And that’s all with that you have an information button with a explanation popup system you can use in PowerPoint. Enjoy!

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