Microsoft PowerPoint is much more than just a presentation tool. It provides a wide variety of options for giving information and helping people process it and memorize the most important points.

PowerPoint can help you re-create standard learning techniques in a much more engaging and effective way. Let's think of the most popular learning tool. How about Flashcards? Flashcards have always been a great learning tool, so let's try to create a set of interactive, virtual flash cards using trigger animations in PowerPoint. Here is what we will create:

Say I'd like to create a set of flashcards on... ornithology, a branch of zoology dealing with birds. I have four pictures of birds and I want my students to memorize their names. What I do is add the pictures on a PowerPoint slide. I will try to make them relatively equal in size, so that my slide looks well-organized.

Screenshot 1. Front view

Screenshot 2. Back view

Now I add the images that would represent the back-side of the flashcards. In our case, they are solid color cards with birds' names on them. As I want to see pictures of birds on my slide, guess their names and check them, I need the pictures to be on top. So I am going to go ahead and send birds cards to the back. For that I use the Send to Back command of the right-click context menu.

Next step is to make our cards interactive. To make our cards move as realistically as possible I create a Flip Custom Animation effect for each pair of pictures. This effect can be built with the Collapse Exit effect and the Stretch Entrance effect. Get a more detailed description on how to set it in the article Building Flip Custom Animation Effect in PowerPoint.

To make our cards flip when we click the picture, we trigger all the animation effects to start by clicking for each picture. Here is what we do to set a trigger for an animation:

• Right click animation name in Animation Pane
• Choose Timing from the context menu
• In the new window we click Triggers -> Start effect on click of
• Select a from the drop down menu

The flip effect we are using here actually consists of four PowerPoint animation effects. We have to make all four of them start on click of the front graphic.

I do the same thing for all four of my pictures.

Looks like we are almost done. The only thing left is to convert our presentation to Flash with iSpring Pro and check out the result.

Creating Flash cards  is just one of the many ways to create wonderful learning materials by simply using trigger animations in Microsoft PowerPoint. We've made just one sample slide, but there is no limit to human imagination, and a great variety of features to bring your ideas to life.

The sample presentation is available for download in PowerPoint and Flash formats. Use the links below to download:

Click to download .PPTX

Click to download .SWF