Stupid animation question

Here's a couple things that I've done for gotten an arrow to appear from somewhere inside a slide.

I'll often put a rectangle the color of my background and put that on the slide and have the arrow appear from behind that.

If I have a varied background, I'll take a small screen shot of the area I want the arrow to travel behind and then place that on my slide to perfectly cover up the original region.

Another trick for that is to use nested groups of objects with varied animation timing. For example, 1) create a transparent square and 2) place your arrow within a group that contains the square and the arrow. Then you animate your group to Fly in with a timing of 2 seconds (medium, I think). Now within your group, move your arrow to appear later in time and use a fade in with a really fast timing (1.25 seconds). This makes your arrow appear to fade in over a much shorter distance. By moving the timing around you can create some interesting compound effects, combining animation speeds and timing offsets to create custom animations.

Here's the timing speed reference:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19820702/animationSpeed%20output%202.20.2000%20AM/story.html

Can I do that with a fly in, though, Steve?

You can. Take a look at this example.

For that one, I manually entered a start time at an increment other than .25 (I used .4). You can adjust it to make the timing of your visible entry exactly where you want it.