Contrary to popular belief, animation isn't only for children's shows and Saturday morning cereal ads. It can be used effectively in a very adult manner to promote everything from frozen peas to financial products: animation is indeed used to great effect in the world of advertising. Animation can give a brand, product and its creative team infinite artistic and communicative powers to help bring to life visions and ideas that free the audience of mental and physical restraints. Think about the animations used in successful advertising campaigns: they can adapt to any environment, they never grow old and they can be quirky yet still believable. The advert with animation keeps grown-ups informed and amused.

Animation means, literally, to breathe life into something. If shaped to a brand correctly and supported by an engaging message, it will stay in the hearts and minds of the consumer long after the advertisement or online experience has passed. But animation can also be used in a PowerPoint presentation to undertake any of the following: to demonstrate how a mechanical device works; show the anatomy of a product; communicate abstract ideas; visualise things that are too big or too small to photograph or film; and it can apply emotions, story and drama to an inanimate object or product.

Although animation can initially be expensive, it can also be easier to edit, enhance and reformat if need be. Many marketing directors prefer to use animation because it is more timeless than casting lead actors in commercials and can be built up over a number of campaigns, and years, without needing to recast or pay heavy royalties. However, you don't need a Hollywood budget or big-name actors to record voice overs to use animation successfully in a PowerPoint presentation.

You can create moving, animated SmartArt graphics in Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to provide additional emphasis or show any information in phases. You can animate your entire SmartArt graphic or just an individual shape. For example, you can make each circle of a diagram fly in one at a time or create an organisation chart that fades in by level.

To decide which animation works best with the layout for your SmartArt graphic, view your information in the SmartArt graphic text pane, since most animation starts with the top bullet shown on the text pane and moves down. Alternatively, you can play an animation in reverse order. The animations that are available depend on the layout that you choose for your SmartArt graphic, but you can animate all of the shapes at once or one shape at time.

Animated items are noted on the slide by non printing numbered tags. These tags correspond to the animations in the animation pane list, are displayed to the side of your SmartArt graphic, and appear only in normal view with the custom animation task pane displayed.

Animations that you apply to a SmartArt graphic are different from animations that you can apply to shapes, text, or WordArt. Connecting lines between shapes, for example, are always associated with the second shape and are not animated individually. And if you apply an animation to shapes in a SmartArt graphic, the animation plays in the order that the shapes appear. The order can be reversed only as a whole. You cannot reorder the sequence of animations for a single SmartArt graphic (besides reversing the order that the shapes appear).

When you convert a diagram that was created by using a version of PowerPoint earlier than Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to a SmartArt graphic, you may lose some animation settings, or the animation may appear differently. When you switch SmartArt graphic layout, any animation that you have added is transferred to the new layout.

Some animation effects, such as the drop entrance effect or the flip exit effect, are available only for shapes. Effects that are unavailable for SmartArt graphics will appear dimmed. If you want to use animation effects that are unavailable for SmartArt graphics, right-click the SmartArt graphic and click convert to shapes, and then animate the shapes.

You can set the animation effect option by selecting the SmartArt graphic that has the animation that you want to modify. Now, on the animations tab, in the advanced animations group, click animation pane. In the animation pane list, click the arrow to the right of the animation that you want to modify, and then select effect options. In the dialog box, on the SmartArt animation tab, in the Group graphic list, you can select different objects including: "As One Object"," All at Once"," One by One", "Level at Once", and "Level One by One".

There's also the option to copy animations from one SmartArt graphic to another. This is thanks to one of the new features in Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 - the animation painter. Using the animation painter, you can easily and quickly copy an animation or several animations from one SmartArt graphic to another. And there's even the flexibility to animate individual shapes in your SmartArt graphic, reverse the order of an animation, or remove an animation.

Why don't you think about giving animation a starring role in your next PowerPoint masterpiece - popcorn and 3D specs optional, of course.