So I'm making a PowerPoint presentation and my animations were working fine but now they're acting up, instead of the page being blank before the text  animates in like I want the text is instead is present the entire time, then animates, how do I fix it?

I think you need to add an additional animation "APPEAR" for the text before your other animations/effects for that text, otherwise PP says the text is there and he wants to do this (blink, fade, whatever).

Using APPEAR ahead of the other animations/effects for that text will make it initially invisible.  It then appears and then does what you want (blink, whatever).

Nope, still visible.

Post this in the military forum. No shortage there

This is not meant to be snarky, but actual advice.  Drop the animation, it is almost never a good idea.  

One easy way to cheat is to add another animation.

Rather than trying to make text appear you want to cover everything.

Make a white fill square to cover the entire sheet.  Now bring to front.  Now your sheet is "blank"

Now make this your #1 animation to disappear.  This way, you have added insurance that nothing else is visible.  And you can keep all your animations as is.

This.

Unless you're attempting to some very basic line/arrows in a sequence, animation is worthless.

Another golden rule.  Each slide must have an image.  No one wants to just read the bullet points you're going to talk about.

"PowerPoint makes us stupid" -- General Mattis

As someone who sits through a lot of power points... the best presentations are the ones without stupid fuckery building out of slides with lots of animations.

Just put the shit on the screen and skip the animations.

Check the order and timing of your animations.

If you want some graphics or whatever to build (without a text box visible) and you use APPEAR, the text will not be visible until the APPEAR command executes.

I do this all the time to make flash card type study guides.

Example:

Animations:

1.  Whatever preliminary animations/actions you want.
2.  Text box 1:  APPEAR  Your Text Here
3.  Text box 1:  BLINK (or whatever)  Your Text Here
4.  Test box 1:  DISAPPEAR  Your Text Here

Result will be:

1.  SLIDE WILL BE BLANK.
2.  ANIMATIONS IN STEP ONE WILL EXECUTE.
3.  TEXT IN TEXT BOX WILL APPEAR.
4.  TEST IN TEXT BOX WILL BLINK (or whatever).
5.  TEXT IN TEXT BOX WILL DISAPPEAR (SLIDE WILL BE BLANK AGAIN DEPENDING OF COURSE ON PRELIMINARY ANIMATIONS).

You also have to have enough time between animations (with previous, after previous, on click, etc.) to allow things to appear/disappear properly.

Sounds like you have 'with previous' selected as opposed to 'on click', meaning the animation timing is at zero instead of 1.

Regarding you animation haters, it makes sense to build out bullets if you're showing a lot of information. otherwise everyone is reading your screen and not listening to you. And often times getting ahead of you.

I agree bad animations are... bad. But a skilled ppt wizard knows that they have a place.

+1

Also, your slides aren't your speaking notes or a script.

This x1000.

Bullet points yes.