How to Make Your PowerPoint Stand Out: This Super Simple Zoom Animation (With Video)

Today’s presentations need to be just a little more dynamic. A little more exciting. With a few simple clicks, you can turn a boring presentation into a nonlinear format one, taking your audience on a journey to help them really tune into your message.

How? By using the Slide Zoom tool in PowerPoint, you can make a simple yet powerful animation that’ll make your presentation a step above the static slide decks we’ve all seen time after time.

Introducing the Slide Zoom Tool in PowerPoint: An Easy Way to Create Cool Animations

Whether you’re on a PC or a Mac, if you use Office 2019 or are an Office 365 subscriber, you can use the PowerPoint Zoom feature.

There are two ways to use Zoom, but they both start with building your presentation as normal. By normal, I mean a linear format, making all slides that you normally would.

You can now create a Summary Zoom, which is a tool to put all your sectional header slides in thumbnail version on a single slide. This way, the audience can see the progression of the presentation, and you always return to the summary slide before moving on to the next section.

What I’m madly in love with, however, is the Slide Zoom tool, which is much more fun. Slide Zoom allows you to put any slides in your presentation on a pre-existing canvas slide. You can click on the slide, zoom into it, and then back out to your canvas slide.

The fun comes from finding unique ways to make your slides blend with the canvas slide, giving the effect that you are really zooming into a bigger picture.

How to Use the Slide Zoom Tool to Make Animations in PowerPoint

I like to start by choosing a good background image, here’s the one I used in the demonstration video you can watch after this article. You can set it as a background image by choosing Design à Format Background.

Elsewhere in my presentation, I have a traditional chart slide I’d like to zoom into the picture:

On the slide with the people, which I’ll call the canvas slide, click Insert à Zoom à Slide Zoom.

Choose the pie chart slide, and it will be placed right into the center of the canvas slide.

On the new Zoom Tools ribbon tab that has appeared, you can make changes to the pie chart slide. You’ll want to check Return to Zoom, which will return you to your canvas slide after you click away from the pie chart. This gives you the ability to keep adding slides to the canvas slide and presenting from that.

I also like to check Remove Background, which will make your zoom slide transparent, allowing you to fully immerse it into the canvas slide.

From here, I can resize the pie chart slide, skew it, move it, and fully integrate it into the canvas slide. In the demonstration video, I made it look like it’s part of the laptop computer in the image.

Now, when you are presenting in full screen, and you’re on this canvas slide, you can click on the pie chart. It will fully zoom in, allowing you to talk about your chart. When you’re done, click away, and you’ll zoom back out to the full canvas again, allowing you to click and zoom into another slide.

Want to learn more from Jess? View her LinkedIn Learning course, PowerPoint Essential Training for Office 365.

Lessons within that course include:

• How to add and format video in PowerPoint
• How to add and work with audio files in PowerPoint
• How to add animations to objects and text in PowerPoint
• How to add slide transitions in PowerPoint
• How to use Morph to create animations in PowerPoint