Just about any slide is better viewed in stages. It's usually not necessary to animate the title, but showing your bullets with a click of your presentation mouse just as you discuss them (not read them!) makes you appear polished and prepared. This is where many occasional presenters draw the line, saying, "I don't have time to learn all of that animation stuff." Well, do you have time to craft a new resume? If you're lucky, you can tell your assistant, "Make this stuff appear one thing at a time." If it's just you, bite the bullet and learn some simple PowerPoint or Keynote skills.

Animation in PowerPoint is straightforward. PowerPoint 2002/XP and PowerPoint 2003 have Animation Schemes; you can instantly apply them to one or more slides by selecting them in Slide Sorter view. Doing so times the entrance of your bullets in seconds. For more complex material, such as photos, charts and diagrams, you need to open Custom Animation. Select each object in your slide and give it a simple entrance effect. Dissolve or Fade are usually the best effects for a novice to choose; whizzing and spinning don't work for many diagrams and also rarely impress audiences.

As you add entrance effects to objects, they are placed in order in the Custom Animation panel. You can reorder the effects by selecting one and using the up and down arrows at the bottom of the panel to reposition it. For charts and PowerPoint native diagrams, you can also click the Effect Options for any specific animation and locate animation specific to the object. On a chart, for example, you can have data appear by series or category. This is very effective, particularly if you rehearse. Knowing what comes next can help you polish your delivery by setting up the next part of a chart or diagram, and avoid being surprised by what suddenly appears on the screen. It's easy to identify speakers who haven't rehearsed; they frequently need to go back to a previous slide because they advanced one click too far.

You can animate any object that you can select, by which I mean you can make an object appear when you are ready to talk about it. For large objects that can't be broken up, such as scanned diagrams or charts, use the Drawing toolbar and AutoShapes to highlight specific areas of the diagram, and animate their appearance.

You can also break up a set of bullets with visuals. Click the little double drop-down arrow under the bullet object in the order list to expand into individual components. This lets you move animated effects in between the individual bullets in the order list, so that you can show, for example, a picture, a bullet, another picture and then the next bullet.