10 Creative Ways To Use Text Transitions In Keynote

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some creative ways that you could use text animation in Keynote. 

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So there are a bunch of different text transitions and animations that you could use in Keynote. The problem is if you just use the default with those animations you're going to get a presentation that looks like everybody else's. Sometimes the best effects are not to use those animations as the defaults on plain text but to actually go into the settings, make some changes, and do some creative things to make the text appear and disappear in a more interesting way. 

Here I have a slide with just a simple text box in the middle of the slide. I've selected it and I can go to Animate, in the sidebar here,  and I've got Build In, Action, and Build Out animations that I can add. If I want the text to appear in an interesting way I can use a Build In animation like Add an Effect. Then I can choose from all these different effects here. So let's choose one. Fly In. I can select that and you can see that's how the text appears. It's okay. It's maybe better than the text just appearing and maybe not.

But this really isn't that interesting and, of course, it's the default. So it's what you're going to get if anybody else chooses Fly In as well. You can make it more interesting by going into these settings here. Here I've got the same piece of text with Fly In but instead of the default what I've done is I've set it to Random. So instead of coming from the left, all the letters just coming in one by one, the letters are going to fly in randomly. Now when I go and look at what it can do this is the result that I get. Much more interesting. 

On this next example something similar. I've got this piece of text here and I've chosen Fade and Move as the build in animation. This is what it looks like. Just slides in and kind of fades in at the same time. Nothing too special. But if I change that and move the text so that every word is on one line, put it over here on the left, and then do Text Delivery by Word rather than the entire object I get an animation that looks like this. Now it's got the audience reading every word as it appears on the screen and when it's done it's all here on the left and I can have other items build in or have another slide where this is there and the rest of my information is going to appear here on the right.

So here's a Build In transition that I don't like at all and it's default. Put some text in the middle of the screen and then it drops it from the top and for some reason it bounces in the middle of the screen. I see this all the time where text bounces there. Why is it bouncing there? Things usually bounce when they hit the ground. Right. So, here's a better way to do it. I've put an image here on the background and there's a definite ground on the bottom of this table here. In addition to that I've set the delivery By Word and Random. So these words are going to drop in randomly and rest here on this table. I think that is much more interesting.

Now I think changing the text before you actually animate it is very important, like I showed you before. Here's this text in the middle and I can just do a simple move in like that. Nothing special. But if I were to put each word here on the right on it's own line and do delivery By Word then the words fly across the screen and rest there on the right. Now you can go a step further than this because there's no reason why the text even needs to rest anywhere. Here you can see the text isn't even there. I'm going to shrink is down a little bit and you can see the text is actually on the right off of the slide. So what's going to happen when you run this is the text will fly across the screen and then off of it. So it leaves you with a blank slide ready to transition to the next one. People will read the words as they fly across the screen. They can be flying from top to bottom, left to right, anyway that you want it. But they don't actually land anywhere which makes it a little more interesting than having the text remain there. It's especially interesting if that quick concept that you want to get across, you want it to animate on the screen, and naturally go to your next thought.

Now sometimes transitions aren't great for titles but are great for other things. For instance here's this regular sample text we've been using. If if use the default Typewriter it's going to type it all out. I hate that animation. It seems so simple, too simple. But it is useful for other things. For instance say you have an entire page of text. Say you have to put an entire thing up. You're a lawyer and you want to put the law up there. Or you want to put a big quote from somebody. It's something, maybe, that everybody needs to read but you need to throw this text up on the screen. You can use the Typewriter effect here. Put it in Random. If you do it in just regular forward it's just going to type out each character. But if you do it in Random and then you do it in a really short period of time, like 3 seconds, it will all fill in really quickly like that. It's not going to take up anymore time than the number of seconds that are specified. So it comes in fast, it's more interesting, and it gives the sense that something is forming. So you can be talking about, like, that this thing that you're showing was created by somebody or formulated by somebody and then it forms on the screen.

So here's a transition I think is a little flashy. It's just sparkle and draws everything up on the screen. But it can be more interesting if you play around with the text a bit. On this slide I've used text with an interesting font and I've used a gradient there to make it look like it's glowing. Not only that but if you look formatting here for the text I've got that advanced gradient fill. I've got an interesting outline and shadow set to make it look like it's glowing. So I played around with the text quite a bit. In addition to that if I move that away you can see I actually have two copies of this text because underneath it a copy that doesn't have all that. In fact it's just a plain gray color. That text doesn't have an animation applied to it. The colorful text that fits perfectly on top of it does. So when I play this I start off with the gray text and there could be other things on the screen. This is kind of like a neon sign that's been turned off. Then when I want to turn it on it uses that sparkle animation and the result is I get this glowing text instead. So it's like I turned on something or thought of an idea or coming to some sort of conclusion.

Now there's another type of transition. It's the Action transition. This is when you're on a frame and you actually do something like I'm going to click and then it does something like this pop here. The Pop action. It's not that exciting. It just makes the whole piece of text pop but it doesn't have to do it for the whole piece of text. On this slide it looks like that same thing but I actually have two pieces of text here. I've got all the words and I've got just the word most. As a matter of fact if I move the word most away you can see the word most is missing from here. It's actually not missing. It's there. I've just set the opacity to zero for the word most but not for the other letters. So, most is still there and taking up the same amount of space you just can't see it. It's invisible. Then I put a piece of text, the same font and the same size, and put that word most right in that space. So now when I play this you can see just the word most does that pop. So it allows me to add emphasis to that word.

In fact under Animation here if I go to Build Order you can see there's most and I could set this to On Click so I have to click to have that word to pop. I could do that for several words. So if this is something longer and there's like three different words I want to emphasize I can have each of those pop on separate clicks as I want to emphasize those words when I'm talking.

Now, of course, there's also Build Out animation. There's some animations that work much better for Build Out than Build In. Here's the bouncy animation for building in and it's got text that comes in a fun kind of way. But I think it's kind of cheesy for text that's coming in. However, I think it works better when it's actually an animation for Built Out. So here's what you get. The text is on the screen already and you're talking about it and then you want to dismiss the text. The text promptly leaves. I think this is a great idea for when you're showing an idea and you want to dismiss it. You say, well here is the original idea that we had but this isn't going to work. You dismiss it and it leaves. Then you bring in the real idea that you want to talk about. Here's another example of that. In this one I've got Build Out using Vanish. I think this works great as a way to get text off the screen. It vanishes. You can be talking about this is how we did something in the past and then have it vanish, go away, and then you can bring in the way things are done today. 

Now I know one of the primary ways that you animate things in Keynote is using Magic Move. You can use Magic Move for text as well. So here I've actually got what looks like a blank slide but I have each word here in its own text box and I've placed outside of the visible area. Then if I look at the slides you can see here the next slide has the same boxes but all lined up exactly where I want. So using Magic Move,  since all I've done is basically have these two duplicate slides but with the text in different locations, and Magic Move will then transition and positions all those and brings them in. The great thing above this is you have complete control where each one of those is. So you can put them all in the upper right hand corner. You can put them all below or above or one key word come in from the right while the others come in from the left. That kind of thing.

Here's another way you can use Animation. It's not using Magic Move but it's simply animating this one word. So I have all the rest of the words here. I could have done this as one text block. But I have one word that starts outside. As I play it it's going to jump into place. The way I set that up is basically I've got all these words out here and I've got this word all by itself. Then you go to Animate, Action and then you select Move. It will put this default movement in here. You can see this red line. The start and the end. So move the start over there and move the end where you want it to end. Then move your cursor slowly until you find the middle spot in the line. You can see it changes to a circle there. You can drag and curve. So you can Preview it and see that last word jump into place. The cool thing is I can continue to bend this line by going to these middle points. So I can do all sorts of crazy, wacky things with this line and create weird floating animations to have this word move in. There's nothing to from prevent me from having all of the words move in using this. It's just how much time you want to put in to using this kind of animation.

Now this just scratches the surface of what you can do. You can look through all the different transitions. Remember to look at Build In, Action, Build Out to consider all the different things you can do in Keynote and come up with some of your own text transitions to make your presentation different than everybody else's