One thing that was missing, however, was animation support. It doesn’t have to be those fancy fly-in effects everybody is tired of watching. Professionally used, animations can make your presentation easier to follow and more effective. As an example, you can introduce the methodology used to gather your data before really showing the results. Animations used in this way help you tell your story while presenting. And this is why we’ll be introducing animations in the preview with version 22 of our List & Label reporting tool.
Most of the objects, report container items, table cells etc. now have a new property called “Preview Animation”. As an example, take the following static charts:
How about first displaying the heading and then – step-by-step – the charts, triggered by user interaction (or even the good old presenter sticks)? Let’s just do that.
The animation filters are part of the operating system and might be slightly different on your machine, however, on our test farm the filters we’ve chosen were available absolutely consistent. For the pie chart we choose a “Wheel” animation which gives the effect of radially wiping the chart visible. Note the “Data Area Only” property which allows to display the legend right from the start and just hides the actual chart. The resulting set of properties looks like this:
For the bar chart we use a different animation type (“Wipe”) that allows to smoothly animate the bars from the left to the right. The result can be seen in the animation below. Your data now really speaks to the audience. Way more than eye candy … although you can use the feature to get just that ;-).
Leading the development at combit as Managing Director. Microsoft .NET enthusiast driving innovation & agile project management. Used to be a physicist in my first life. I love hiking and vanlife.
