PowerPoint Presentations design advice

We spent years cursing Microsoft for the ‘bug’ in PowerPoint 2003 that made the numbers and text in graphs go fuzzy when you added animation to a graph. We tried all sorts of solutions – from using different types of animation, to manually typing in the axis labels and legend text to try and get around it – none of which were ideal solutions. Until one day…

One of our team was changing a slide background colour to black and changing the axis labels on a graph to white. At some point during this process she was messing around with the background of the axis labels – there seemed to be 3 options for this: transparent (the default); opaque; and automatic. She then added the animation to the graph, expecting to see that dreaded fuzzy text, but strangely on this occasion, the axis text seemed to be as sharp as a knife. She wondered whether the colour of the background was making a difference – so she did a few more tests and lo and behold, found that it was the axis label background option that seemed to making the difference. Had she just fixed Microsoft’s bug?

So, want to rid yourself of jagged, blurry text on animated graphs? Here’s how:

Ø Add any animation you want to your chart

Ø Select your axis (x or y), right click and choose Format Axis

Ø Under the Font tab, choose your font colour, and then on the Background drop down, choose Opaque

Ø Repeat for other axis, and the legend text if applicable

Ø And voila - watch your animation!

Why does this work? Wehave absolutely no idea, but it does!