A workaround for the lack of trigger animations in Keynote

One Powerpoint feature that Keynote does not yet have is animation triggers. In Powerpoint, you can set an animation to be triggered when a particular object elsewhere on the slide is clicked. This can be used to create interactivity for web-based elearning, or perhaps for presentations where there is some interaction from the audience and the exact sequence of clicks is not figured out in advance.

A workaround to create a trigger effect is to make the triggers into hyperlinks that link to slides that look identical to the slide containing the trigger, but which contain the response animation. For each trigger, there will be a corresponding animation slide. The animations are set to begin “after transition” or in other words, right after the slide loads.

In the example shown here, the two round jewels serve as the triggers. Clicking either round jewel appears to trigger the corresponding square jewel’s animation. What really happens, though, is that the presentation jumps to the slide containing the correct animation, which is triggered by that slide’s loading.

Click here to view a flash version exported from the Keynote file

Click here to download the example keynote file (zip archive)