Control Google Earth with PowerPoint Animation

 An earlier post showed how Shape2Earth for PowerPoint makes it easy to add Google Earth slides to your PowerPoint presentations.  In that example, each slide held a single Google Earth view, and zoomed to the location on each slide that was selected in PowerPoint during design time.

This post will demonstrate how to create multiple Google Earth views in a single slide by using the simple animation tools that are built into PowerPoint.

Starting with a title page below, we will select a Google Earth slide template from the Shape2Earth menu in PowerPoint.

The selected template puts a new slide with a Google Earth placeholder next to text in the slide.  It also opens up Google Earth in the Task Window that will be used to set the Google Earth views for this slide.

The first thing to do is to add information to the slide.  We can also set the view for the slide by clicking on the Set View button in the Google Earth window.

 Next, we will apply an animation to the text.  Animation settings are available from the Animation menu in PowerPoint.  In this example, we have selected for the text to fly in.

After the animation has been applied, you will see Animation fly to information added to the Google Earth placeholder in the slide.  This will help us keep track of what Google Earth views are associated with each Animation set on our text.

In the example below, I have clicked on the "Cadet Chapel" text on the slide.  This turns the Animation View in the placeholder red.  I can then move Google Earth to the view I want to set, and click the Set View button.  This will change the information in the placeholder so that I know this Animation View has been set.

Repeat this process for each Animation.

When the slide show is run, this slide will initially zoom to the view selected for that slide.

Each time the slide is advanced, the animation on the text will be run.  As soon as that happens, Google Earth will zoom to the view set for that animation.

You an add as many slides and animations as you would like.

This is just a small example of what can be done with Shape2Earth for PowerPoint.  My next entry will show how to make your presentation in Google Earth, and then import it into PowerPoint.