Fix bullets to come in one at a time

[Rudi]

Hi,

My wife got a presentation (sample attached) from someone which is not well designed. In the 40+/- slides of the presentation, there is no physical return at the end of the points, meaning that the animation does not work to bring each point in one at a time. Instead, the whole paragraph comes in as one point, even though I have ensured that the animation is set to by paragraph. It does fix it if I click at the end of a point, then backspace (to merge with the previous point), then enter again. This obviously registers as a new paragraph and in the slideshow, this brings the points in one at a time.

My question:
Is there a faster way of fixing this that manually entering after each point in 40 odd slides...? Maybe a macro or other automated fix?

BTW: I thought I was being smart to export the outline to Word and then use Word to Find/Replace, but there is no soft returns to find and replace? Which is weird?? It just breaks to the next line without a small arrow?

If a macro can fix it, I think it would have to find a bullet, move the cursor to the end of the point and hard return ~OR~
Find a bullet, move the cursor one character backwards, then hard return?
Something like that if its possible?

Let me know if you have any bright ideas to fix this... TX

[HansV]

On the first sheet:
Click in the text box.
On the Animations tab, click the arrow in the lower right corner of the Animation group.
Activate the Text Animation tab.
Select 'By 2nd Level Paragraphs' from the dropdown.
Click OK.

On the second sheet, I can't get it to work at all.

[Rudi]

I followed your advice and also failed to get it working?! This is strange! Never seen this persistent behaviour before...

[Rudi]

OK, now I have the opposite: Slide 2 is animating fine and slide 1 is not?

What I did was open the master slide, redefined the animation on the master to come in one by one and ensured by 2nd paragraph. Then I closed the master and selected all the slide thumbnails down the left window, and choose Reset. Now it does as described above...???

[HansV]

After changing the slide master, the 'By 2nd Level Paragraphs' setting has been reset. You have to apply it again.

[Rudi]

What I see different now is that slide 1 shows custom built animation in the animation pane, and slide 2 shows Master Body (obviously copying it from the master slide animation). When I delete the custom animation from slide 1, then it has NO animation. How can I link it to the master slides animation so it also shows Master Body in the animation pane?

[Rudi]

OK, that did it. I see it did reset to first paragraph. Setting in to 2nd has name both work. Now to apply this theory to the actual presentation...

[Rudi]

Nope...was not so lucky! When I reset all the slides, it threw out all the text and bullet formatting. I just put this down to "Bad" design where whoever set up this presentation did not use the placeholders and built in standards of PPT.

What I am resorting to is exporting the text to Word (as plain text)
Using Words outline view to premote/demote the text
Import into a new PPT
And whallaa....perfect.

I tested this on a few slides to try it and it works well. So I'll just have to spend 30-60 minutes of promoting/demoting text. The rest of it will be a breeze to import and reanimate...

TX Hans

[HansV]

I've wrestled with badly designed presentations too. Sometimes it's easiest to keep only the plain text and to rebuild the formatting, transitions and animations...

[Rudi]

Agreed, and it benefits any future additions and modifications...
Cheers