Mask with PowerPoint: Part II

Hi folks. Today, we shall continue with Part II of Mask with PowerPoint.
If you are familiar with the glow masking animation in Flash, this tutorial should be interesting to you. For first timer, glow masking animation is an effect that can be created in Flash. A simple example to explain how this works would be: Allowing a text to glow from the left direction to right, and is normally done in a slow manner. Here's a preview of the glow masking animation.


Figure 1: Glow mask a text in PowerPoint.

While you probably need to create this effect in Flash using masking, this can be easily achieved with PowerPoint 2002/XP and later versions' custom animations. To start off, set your background to black or any dark colors (Click Format > Background. Click on the dropdown field and select black).
Create a textbox and add in some text.
Now, open up the custom animation. Click Slide Show > Custom Animation.
Select the textbox, then click Add Effect > Emphasis > Change Font Color. * Also note that this cannot be done using WordArt *
On the Change Font Color effect, set the Font Color property to white.
Set the Speed property to Fast.
Now, double click on the Change Font Color effect to open up the Effect Options dialog box.
Under Enhancements section, click on the Animate text dropdown field and select By letter.
Give it a 10-13% delay between letters. Any numbers between 10 to 13 should be appropriate.
Click Ok.

Next, add another Change Font Color effect. Click Add Effect > Emphasis > Change Font Color.
On the Change Font Color effect, set the Font Color property to black. * Note that the color you set here is the actual or original color of the text. Hence, if you have a red text here, set the Font Color property to red. *
Set the Speed property to Fast.
Double click on the Change Font Color effect to open up the Effect Options dialog box.
Ensure that under the Enhancements section, the Animate text is set to By letter.
Give it a delay that is similar to the one you have set earlier on the first Change Font Color effect.
Now, click on the Timing tab.
Click on the Start dropdown field and set it to With Previous. This allows both the Change Font Color effects to animate at the same time.
Next, set the Delay to 1 second. This allows the second Change Font Color effect to start 1 second AFTER the first Change Font Color effect.
Click Ok and preview it in the slide show. If you are satisfied with it, we are done. If not, you can always experiment with the settings by adjusting the speed, delay and N % delay between letters.

To make it even more complex, you can even enable the border of the text to glow rather of the body itself! Unfortunately, this has to be done by duplicating an additional textbox. I will not be covering this effect. I certainly hope that you will experiment and figure it out instead. This is how we learn more things, isn't it? ;-)

And at anytime if you encounter problems, this attachment will definitely help. The attachment below includes the basic glow masking animation taught above, and also a sample on the border glowing animation:
http://pptheaven.mvps.org/blog/MaskingEffectPartII.zip

And not to forget, stay tuned for Part III!