Caution when animated PowerPoint graphs are delivered via Live Meeting

I recently delivered a webinar using the Microsoft Live Meeting system. I had not used this system before and it is one of the systems where you upload your slides to their site. My usual system is one where I share my desktop, so you are seeing my desktop exactly as I am presenting. The difference with the Live Meeting system is that they do some conversion of your slides to fit their system. And I found one type of graph animation that doesn’t get converted properly.

In one of my slides, I show a bar graph that has text in each bar explaining what that bar refers to. The text is actually a text box placed on top of the bar because it fit better that way and gave the look I wanted. In the animation, I animate each bar of the graph to come on one at a time so I can discuss each item individually. To have the text come up at the same time as the bar, I animate the text box and have it appear with the bar. In the Custom Animation task pane, I move the text box animation effect in the middle of the graph bar animation so the builds happen at the right time. And apparently that causes the problem.

Any time you have an object animate in the middle of a graph animation, Live Meeting does not convert it properly. It can’t handle splitting up the graph animation apparently. It resolves it by animating all graph elements at once and then the non-graph elements based on the timing set on those elements. In the bar graph, because the text box timing is set to happen with the bars, all the bars and the text boxes came on at the same time. In another graph, since the other object was set to appear on a click, I had to advance to get the object to appear. In both cases, I had advance warning because in our practice session the issue had cropped up. So I spoke to the slide as Live Meeting decided to present it.

The lesson for you is that if you are using Live Meeting to deliver your presentation over the web, make sure that you do not animate other objects in the middle of a graph animation, because it will not work the way you expect it to. Redesign your slide, use exit animation effects to reveal each part, or use multiple slides with one build on each slide to get around this issue. Now I know better for next time.