How to Animate Text Color in PowerPoint

Animating text color in PowerPoint can be a great way to emphasize key points, make your presentation more dynamic, and hold your audience’s attention. With just a few simple steps, you can create eye-catching text animations that transition from one color to another with a click.

Why Animate Text Color in PowerPoint?

Here are some of the key benefits of using text color animations in your PowerPoint presentations:

  • Draw attention to important text: Fading, flashing or changing the color of text is an effective way to highlight key ideas, statistics, quotes, or conclusions that you want your audience to remember.
  • Add visual interest: Subtle animations add motion and visual dynamics to text that might otherwise remain static on the slide. This keeps your viewers engaged.
  • Reinforce verbal cues: Animating text color in sync with your spoken remarks can help reinforce the points you are making verbally.
  • Boost memorability: Colorful animations tend to stick in people’s minds better than plain text. This boosts recall of your key messages.

Step 1: Select the Text You Want to Animate

Start by selecting the text on your slide that you want to animate. You can select a single word, phrase, sentence or entire paragraph.

To select text, simply click and drag your cursor across the text. The selected text will appear highlighted.

Step 2: Add a Text Color Animation

Next, with your text still selected, head over to the Animations tab in the PowerPoint ribbon.

In the Animation section, click the drop-down arrow below Animation Styles and select More Emphasis Effects near the bottom of the list.

PowerPoint Animation Styles

This will open a menu with various text emphasis animations to choose from. Under the Basic or Exciting sections, click Font Color.

Font Color Animation

And that’s it! PowerPoint will now animate a color change across the selected text when you click during your slideshow.

Step 3: Change the Animated Text Color

By default, PowerPoint animates a change from black text to white text. But you can easily customize this to transition from any color to any color.

With your animated text still selected, open the Effect Options menu on the Animations tab. Click the drop-down next to Font Color and choose the color you want the text to change to on click.

Change Animated Text Color

You can also change the initial text color before the animation by selecting your text and changing the font color using the options on the Home tab.

Step 4: Preview and Adjust the Animation

Before finalizing your text color animation, take a moment to preview how it will look and make any adjustments.

Click the Preview button on the Animations tab to see the animation in action. Pay attention to the timing and overall effect.

If needed, you can tweak settings like the animation Duration, Delay before start, or Start behavior in the Advanced Animation pane. Expand this pane using the button on the Animations tab.

Step 5: Add Multiple Color Animations

You aren’t limited to a single text color animation per text box. Feel free to add multiple animations to transition through several colors.

Simply repeat the steps above, choosing a different end-color for each animation you add. Just be careful not to overdo it as too many animations can be distracting.

Pro Tip: Animating Multi-Color Text

For extra visual impact, you can animate a color change across individual letters or words in a text box.

Start by selecting your text and making different letters different colors using the text highlight color option.

Then add a Blink animation from the Exciting section of Emphasis Effects. This will cause all the letters to blink to white then back to their original colors.

Common Text Animation Effects

Beyond simple color changes, PowerPoint has tons of text animation effects you can use:

  • Fades (in/out)
  • Fly ins
  • Blinks
  • Path animations
  • Spinning
  • Underline
  • And more!

Explore all the options on the Animations tab to create custom text animations that fit your presentation content and style.

Animate Text Color Like a Pro

With this simple 5-step process, you can start adding professional text color change animations to your PowerPoint slides.

Use these animations strategically to draw attention to and reinforce your key messages during a presentation. Animated text that transitions from one color to another upon clicking can be a great technique for boosting engagement and memorability.