Animating one word at a time in Powerpoint or Keynote

[annk]

I'm trying to use Power Point to make animated slides of basic Chinese sentences. Here's an example:

小高的 家 很 漂亮。

You don't need to know what that says to help me, the point is that I want to make slides where each set of characters (separated by spaces) can be brought in, one at a time, by clicking the space bar or mouse.

I can make the entire sentence slide in or appear slowly in PPT, and I can make one element at a time fade in slowly when I use Keynote, but I can't seem to find a function that lets me steer individual words' or characters' appearance by clicking.

I promised one of my teachers to help with this - she showed me some examples others had made, and asked if I could do the same. I was sure I could - I've used PPT quite a bit - but now that I'm actually trying to do it, I'm stumped by this one thing.

[bluebomberman]

Slide Show>Custom Animation

Add an effect, then click on Effect Options.
Click on the Text Animation submenu and change the "Animate Text" option.

You can also try putting each section of the phrase into separate text boxes and having them animate individually.

Finally, remember that in Slide Show>Custom Animation, you can queue and reorder animations as you wish.

[annk]

Originally Posted by bluebomberman

Slide Show>Custom Animation

Add an effect, then click on Effect Options.
Click on the Text Animation submenu and change the "Animate Text" option.

You can also try putting each section of the phrase into separate text boxes and having them animate individually.

Finally, remember that in Slide Show>Custom Animation, you can queue and reorder animations as you wish.

I did the first you suggest, but all that happens is that the sentence appears/slides in. The best I could do was to make each word appear slowly, by adjusting the number of seconds. I've also tried to putting each word or set of words into boxes, but it looks REALLY bad (almost impossible to get even), and it didn't work besides (they all came in at the same time).

I also just tried making many consecutive slides, where each word/element was added in the new. I figured this might work, because the effect I'm after is that each element is added by clicking the space bar or mouse. But weird, blank slides (or slides with only the title in them) appear in between each slide with text. These blank slides don't show up on the sidebar, so I can't delete them. But it's very disconcerting to watch.

My teacher wants to learn to make teaching aids like the ones found on the bottom of this page, and all I'm trying to do, is make a few very basic ones she can use as a point of departure, and write out instructions for her.

[bluebomberman]

Okay, I see. The only option you have is to put each separate character/word/phrase you want to animate into a separate text box. Then use Custom Animation. You'll have to set each effect to "on click" so that you can go back and forth with the animations in sequential order.

Lining up the text boxes is a bit of a pain, but not impossible. Best bet: right click, choose "format autoshape" or "format text box" or something similar, click on the "position" tab, then set each box to the same vertical height. You can also fine-tune the horizontal positioning; I bet you'll need to do this as well.

I wonder if Keynote has an easier way to do this. I am 99% sure Powerpoint does not.