A PowerPoint ticker text animation on your slides is great to use. Most people place or expect a text ticker, ticker tape or text marquee at the bottom of the presentation or television screen. There are a few good reasons to use a PowerPoint ticker:

• First of all, it has a continuous animation which draws more the attention to the screen.
• Secondly, it can display a long text or combine messages into a large message.  Think about the last 10 headlines of the news.
• Because it runs continuously, it allows you to show the same text over multiple slides.  Each slide can still show some specific information, but the text ticker will continue to play.  Basically, you can combine your normal information slides and still make room for a ‘second channel’.
• And finally, this is an optional step, you can use data linking tools or add-ons to change the content of the text, even while the slideshow is running.

How to add a PowerPoint ticker text animation

There are basically 3 options:

1. Normal text box, with PowerPoint ticker text animation, but static content
2. Dynamic ticker via DataPoint
3. Dynamic tickers via TickerPoint

1. Normal PowerPoint ticker animation

A PowerPoint ticker text animation or ticker tape or marquee, is a normal text box with some static text, but with a specific animation on it.  Start by adding or using an existing text box from your slide. Type your (static) text. Later on, you will learn about how to make this text box content dynamic. But that is for later.

Then zoom out so that you have more room around your slide.  Move your text to the left of your slide, so that the text box is out of view.

Click to open the PowerPoint Animations tab.  Select the Lines animation from the Motion Paths group.

Then click the Effect Options and select the Left option from the Direction group. This indicates that the text box will move from right to left.

The animation path is drawn as a line on your slide, and has a red bullet and a green bullet.  The red bullet indicates the ending position while the green bullet or marker, sets the starting position of the animation.

Now, select that green starting point and move it completely to the right of the slide, so that the text box is at the right side.

TIP: Hold the SHIFT key while moving to make sure that you remain on a perfect horizontal line.

Go to Start option at the Timing group in the ribbon, set With Previous to avoid that you have to click (the default setting) to the start the animation.  Also adjust the Duration to assure a smooth and readable, but not boring speed of the animation. Take into account the length of the text and the font size.

Click to open the Animation Pane.  In this animation pane, select the first animation and click the down arrow icon to open its sub menu.  Click the Timing… option there.

Set the Repeat option to Until End of Slide and click OK to commit.

Run the slide show and the text ticker or ticker tape will run continuously on your screen.

Note that with this implementation, you have 2 disadvantages.

First, the content of your text box is static.  This means that you have to stop the slide show, go to the slide, edit the text of the text box, change the animation settings like e.g. a new duration, and then start the slide show again.

The second disadvantage is that the text ticker is visible on this current slide only and not on all slides of the slide show.

2. Dynamic ticker via DataPoint

OK. The first disadvantage of a normal text ticker in PowerPoint is that the content is static. We have an add-on for PowerPoint to solve that problem. DataPoint can connect your presentation to a data source like e.g. a RSS feed. Furthermore, DataPoint allows you to connect a simple native PowerPoint text box to this data source and display this information in real-time.  And with real-time here, we mean that you start your slideshow with this information, and when the newspaper or publisher of the RSS feed, is adding new articles to the RSS feed, the content of the text box is updated automatically while the slideshow is running.

Here we will link a text box to the Title column of the RSS feed.

Check this text box to use as a ticker.  Check its direction and change its speed.

With the settings as they are now, we would only display the content of the first article at the text ticker. Activate data scrolling for this connection in order to display all news articles of the entered RSS feed.

Below you will see how this slide show is running.  Excuse us for the simple slide show design, but at the bottom you will see the text ticker running.  All articles are displayed there as one long text. The different articles are separated by -.

Perfect ticker! And the content of our ticker is dynamic now, but still running on one single slide.

To have a smooth running text ticker over all slides of your presentation, we have to look in another option called TickerPoint.

3. Dynamic tickers via TickerPoint

Final option is that our TickerPoint add-on for PowerPoint. This is the only add-on that can display and dynamic content and smoothly run over all slides.

With TickerPoint set up the text ticker at the slide master.  The slide master you might ask! Yes, the slide master because here the text ticker is set up and valid for all slides of your presentation. Add a data connection like e.g. a RSS feed and select a text box from your slide master.

Select the column that you want to use as text ticker content.

Optionally, set a custom filter to filter out e.g. offensive language and other words.

And that is it. Run your slide show and TickerPoint will display this text display basically as a free floating text ticker over all your slides, independently of what slide you are currently on. This option is the nicest and most smooth running option that there is.

Or see here a captured video of a TickerPoint presentation and slideshow:

Conclusion

The above 3 options give you clear instructions on how to set up text tickers or ticker tapes in PowerPoint.  First one comes for free as standard animation in PowerPoint, others are paid.  One static, some dynamic.  Remember that text tickers are great because it is attractive and you can show many characters and messages than a normal regular standing still text box.