Aligning PowerPoint voice over and animations

This time we have a bit more on solving problems with creating a voice over PowerPoint. We look at how we can align the entry of animations to cue with our voice over in our sound file. This should be easy... right?

Well, it isn't. At least, not as far as I have found. I was able set up my animations on clicks, then record my voice over... then not be able to have the animations appear automatically as my voice over played. It didn't matter whether I used the "with" or the "after" timings: I was unable to crack this. I ensured that I set up the slide show, with "show without automation" being unticked; and "using timings, if present" being ticked. I set up my slides under Transitions with the Advance Slide set up to auto-forward after the number of seconds of the voice over plus a buffer. I had my sound file as the first item in the animation pane in the Animations tab. 

But the sound file remains the only element of animation that works as expected... until we are about to leave the slide, when all the other animations appear at once. So I went looking for some solutions. And once more a user problem was answered by Steve Rindsberg, MVP Volunteer Moderator. Steve's superb reply is paraphrased below (Freeman, 2023): 

"PowerPoint has *never* been able to make transitions/animations 'fire' reliably against a timeline. What [we] can do instead is use bookmarks and triggers."

"Add [...]our audio file, start it, then pause it when it reaches a point where [we]'d like an animation to occur."

"On the Playback tab [NB: Playback - on the far right of the ribbon - will only show if we are already clicked onto our embedded sound file], click Add Bookmark. [We then] Add bookmarks at each point where [we want] an animation to occur. It'll help later if [we] keep a list of each added bookmark, what the audio cue is and what action it's supposed to trigger. If [we] haven't already added [...]our animations" we need to do that before we can add the bookmarks. 

At this point I deleted all my existing animations and recreated them.  

"Now select the first animated shape, and on the Animation tab | Advance Animation group, click Trigger, click On Bookmark and choose the bookmark [we] want to act as the trigger for the animation."

"Now when the audio reaches one of your bookmarks, it will trigger the chosen animation."

Then, to move our slide on after our animation and voice-over is aligned, we go to the Transitions tab, and - in the Advance Slide area - enter our slide timing (i.e. the length of a voice over plus a second or two) into the "after" box.

Thank you very much, Steve. This actually works!

Sam

References:

Freeman, N. (2023, March 26). PowerPoint Animations will not occur automatically following a time schedule. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/powerpoint-animations-will-not-occur-automatically/24e49ca7-475d-42c0-af11-9107c55941c0