> Those are not benefits. Do not do those things. Anything more complicated than embedding a video is a distraction and will not help your presentation.
> Seriously, trust me on this one.
No, that's your opinion. The best presentations I've seen use animations. Just not on every slide, and not huge distracting animations. Animations can be amazing to emphasize what you're explaining.
DO use animations, just make sure they bring something on the table.
If your talk is about, say, heat engines, and you want to have an animated Carnot cycle or something, great! Do that! That sounds useful! (These days it would probably be implemented as a video, which is why my brain binned it as such, but it really could be done with PowerPoint alone.)
If you want to have your slide chug in from the right "like a locomotive" then have each item on the screen individually fade in "like puffs of steam" then once you're done the whole thing drifts to the top "like smoke" because "steam engines are heat engines", that is the crap I am telling people to get rid of.
> Seriously, trust me on this one.
No, that's your opinion. The best presentations I've seen use animations. Just not on every slide, and not huge distracting animations. Animations can be amazing to emphasize what you're explaining.
DO use animations, just make sure they bring something on the table.