When you’re working in Microsoft PowerPoint adding movement between slides can add visual interest then the flow to a presentation. You can do this by adding transitions.

A transition is the movement that happens when you change from one slide to the next. PowerPoint comes with the number of built in transitions including wipes, fades, cuts, and dissolves. To add transitions between slides you first need to go to the slide sort of view. This will make it easier to add transitions to multiple slides, so click on the View tab in the top navigation and select the slides sort of option then select one or more slides that you want to add a transition too.

Next, head back up to the top navigation and click on the tab for animations. Here, you’ll see the transitions group with some thumb nails for different transition options. If you click on the down arrow you can open the full gallery. You can preview any of the transitions just by clicking on its icon.

Once you’ve found the transition that you like you can decide whether to add a sound between transitions or you can just leave it set to no sound which is generally the best option.

Next, you need to choose the speed. PowerPoint gives you three options: slow, medium and fast. Again, you’ll get a preview of each one as you select it. You’re almost done, up here in the right corner you just need to set when to advance the slide, whether you want the transition to happen when you click the mouse or automatically after a set period of time. I'm going to leave it set to transition on the mouse click.

Lastly, if you decide that you want to apply the transition to all of the slides in your presentation and not just the group you selected, you can click on the option to apply to all. To preview my transitions, I’m going to go to the Slide Show button in the bottom right corner here, and then I can click to my presentation to make sure it looks good.

When you’re done just hit the escape key and you’re back in the slide sort of view. Think of transitions as a compliment to your presentation and not a distraction. Even though they can be pretty fun, it’s best not to go too crazy with transitions in the same presentation. You may want to stick with just one or two transitions styles. Also, transitions can use up a lot of resources especially the fancier ones, so be sure to test your PowerPoint on the computer you’ll be using for your presentation.