scrolling credits, Help!

I need to insert scrolling credits together with narration. I want the two to be synched but do not know how to acheive this. The narration lasts about 100 seconds but the text is only 20 lines.
The ideal would be for a line to appear for the duration of the spoken bit, then the second line to appear in its place and so on.
Needless to say, I'm a novice and require step by step guidance.

I'm okay with guiding you. Here we go...
Oh, and... assuming you have powerpoint 2003 or above... you probably do, and there are ways around that, anyway.
So, you want scrolling, as in line-by-line (like karaoke), or credits style (like at the end of a movie- or beginning of Star Wars)? Well, Ill explain the first one first, and if that's not it, the other one too.
So, you have your text. Place each line that you want to appear in seperate text boxes. (Or wordart. It's the same procedure.) Do this by copying text from somewhere with Ctrl+C, selecting a blank place in the powerpoint window, and pasting with Ctrl+V.
^Make sure these are done in order, and that you don't insert anything else until you are done.*
Format all of the text you want whatever size and color you want.
Set the fill color of all the boxes to the backround color. Some of the boxes max be covered up by others. That's okay.
Then I would spread the boxes out in a column, so they are easier to select.
Now you need to open the animation pane. Slideshow>Custom Animation.
Select all of the textboxes, and only the textboxes, that are the lines of text. Go to Entrance effects> appear. If there is no appear option, go to 'more effects'.
With the same selection, change all of the animation blocks to start "On click".
Now select just the first block, change to "with previous".
Save.
Save again just in case.
Now, record the narration, or add the music/sounds you needed. For narration, start on the slide you need, and press Slideshow>Record narration. The timing will record, too, so press the spacebar when recording after every line.
When finished press ESC. If prompted to save the timings or recording press YES. Remember to start recording right away.
If you mess up... do it again by closing and returning.
Now that the recording and timing is in, stack all the textboxes on each other, stretch them so each covers the one behind it.
When you start normally, the recording should be set to the music.

If what you meant was credits-star wars style... oops. Do this:
Add all the text to a single textbox on the slide.
Resize, color, however you like. But remeber to keep it within the width of the slide. Height should extend the slide down the bottom no more than about one- half a slide.
What would really help is to double-click on the gray box surrounding the text, and in the formatting box, under one of the tabs, is a checkbox for "Word wrap in Autoshape". This lets you resize the text, shape, width, all by dragging the right-side white dot on the selected textbox.
Drag the box border so the bottom is at the top of the slide.
Go to slideshow>custom animation and add the entrance effect "fly in" and from the bottom, set to begin at "After Previous".
Right-click the animation's block and "Show advanced Timeline"
Now you will have to experiment a little, so SAVE.
SAVE AGAIN.
You will have to stretch the timing block (The bar in the animation block) to how long you think it will take you to read the text. Maybe... 20 seconds?s
Record the narration with slideshow>record narration. Get ready quickly.
When finished, press ESC.
If the timing speed worked well with the amount of time it took to read, narrate, and fit into the presentation, press SAVE. If not (probably), exit, load the presentation, go back to the timeline on the slide, and stretch the box longer or shorter to a better time. Maybe if 20 didn't work, try 40 or 15.
Hope this helped! Please relpy with any questions, and I hope you learned some valubale stuff.
-TypetyTypeType

That... is the longest reply I've ever seen for learning to use CA.

Another presentation tip:

• A lack of bullet points, even though you are bulleting, gives the impression that you write more.
• And vice versa.

Thanks a lot for this comprehensive treply.
I'll try it out later and will let you know the results.
Again, thank you for the effort.

To TypetyTypeType

I followed your first set of instructions and managed to record my narrations per line of text then I stacked the boxes.

The narration played properly with each text box. Only problem was each new text box now appeared over the previous one making a messy presentation.
What I want to acheive is that each new box to appear on its own with the narration after the previous text box has disappeared.
Can this be acheived?

Simply add a "Disappear with Previous" animation of the previous textbox onto the Entrance sequence of the next textbox. Do this for all the textboxes and that should do the trick.

personaly after the narration comes i would make it go off the screen ^ that-a-way!

That's not what is requested.

Also, you could do what Prince of Powerpoint said, as an alternative to method 1, yes.
First I would make sure you drag each box over the other completly, and fill each one the backround fill color.
If you want narration with each one and with each narration on click, use an audio recorder and record each textbox phrase as its own WAV file. Then add the sound in the effect options for each appear. Use this with Prince's method.

Thank you all for your valuable help. I had no notion about the appear/disapear facility.

It took me a few attempts to discover how make lines of text do that in sequence and discovered time delay which gave the required effect.

I added separate audios for each text and that worked, but the narration now became disjointed. I want to see if I can make one continuous recording of the texts to plays as the sequence of text lines appear a few seconds then disappear.

I'm getting there with your help so thanks again.
javascript:emoticon(':)')

youl get the hang of everything with a little practice m8(and well ofcourse the forums )

That's exactly what I thought the origional problem was.
Just needed clarification.
Use that first post's instructions then.
Or make each appear when you... oh, you can do it. I know you can.

Your help prompted me to investigate and do a few schemes. Most failed but I'm glad to report the last one did what I wanted it to do. It might not be elegant but what the heck, it worked.

I had more than 20 lines of text, so when I did a scrolling credit for one very long text it started to get crowded towards the end. Doing seperate text boxes that appeared individually then disappeared was much better. I had no idea the disappear facility was there or how to insert it at first.

I use a delay of zero on the appearing text and a delay of a few seconds on the disappear command. This way I can roughly synch the narrative with the lines.

It took me a while to realise I had to insert the sound file ahead of the text lines so it played out throughout the presentation.

Thank you all for your valuable help.

You're always welcome
Thanks guys

By the time you read this, I assume you've already completed what needed to be completed, but for future reference, you can use the "Slide Narration" feature to record the timing of the animations once by playing through them manually in slideshow mode so the next time you play it, PowerPoint remembers the timing; a much more convenient alternative to setting the delay on each animation.

...wow that was a single sentence! I should break that up into several lines of text and make them appear/disappear.