In this new series of articles, Simon Hurst, FSN writer and spreadsheet guru describes how you enliven your business presentations in PowerPoint with animations.
Some of the general enhancements that arrived in Office 2007 and 2010 were of particular relevance to PowerPoint. Not only were there significant improvements to the way Office deals with any type of graphic, but the ribbon interface also makes it easier to find and apply graphics features that already lurked in the depths of earlier versions of Office. In the case of charts, Office 2010 introduced a more sophisticated appearance for charts throughout the Office applications. We will look at how to create charts in presentations using PowerPoint 97 through to 2010 and also the different ways we can animate those charts, including using some of the more advanced features in the most recent versions.
Charts
Charts may well be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of using PowerPoint to present business information. Regardless of version, there are two main ways to incorporate a chart in a presentation. You can either create the chart directly within PowerPoint, or copy an existing Excel chart and paste it into your slide. When you paste a chart into PowerPoint you have a further decision to make: do you want it linked to the original chart so that changes in the Excel chart are reflected automatically in your presentation? There is a drawback in using a linked chart: PowerPoint can animate the individual elements of an 'internal' or unlinked chart but not a linked one.
Creating a chart within PowerPoint
We'll start by creating a chart directly in PowerPoint. If you choose a slide layout that includes a chart in versions up to 2003 or, more generally, 'content' in 2007 and 2010 then you can create a chart directly. Up to 2003, default dummy data will be presented in a 'datasheet', whereas from Office 2007 the same chart 'engine' is used throughout the Office suite and you will see your data in an Excel worksheet:
Once you have replaced the dummy data with the data you want to chart – either by overtyping or by pasting it from another source, you should see a chart that represents your data. You can then use the chart tools to format the chart as you wish.
Animating a chart
Now we will look at animating our chart. PowerPoint animation has changed quite a bit through the different versions. Animations can be applied to any object on the slide and control how the object arrives on the slide – later versions also let you apply effects to the object once it has arrived and also allow the animation of its departure.
From PowerPoint 97 to 2003 you select the object that you want to animate and choose Slide Show, Custom Animation – from XP onwards a Custom Animation task pane replaces the earlier Custom Animation dialog but the techniques are similar. In 2007 and 2010 there is an Animation ribbon tab and an Animation task pane – again, select the chart as before, but in these versions choose one of the animation effects directly from the Animation group of the Animation ribbon, or choose Add Animation from the Advanced Animation group.
Once an animation effect has been applied to a chart, it can be changed to apply to the whole chart or particular chart elements. In versions with a Custom Animation dialog, a Chart Effects tab should be visible within the dialog itself. Where the animation appears in the animation task pane, you can click on the animations dropdown and choose ‘Effect Options’. In addition, in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 the animation effect options are available directly via the Effect Option button of the animation group, with the chart element options in the ‘Sequence section’. In this PowerPoint 2010 example we have chosen an ‘Entrance’ effect and opted for ‘Fly in’:
Choosing one of the ‘By’ options will animate the chosen parts of the chart separately. Where the animation task pane is available these separate animations can be displayed, and edited, individually. Where an animation has multiple elements, an ‘expand’ double down arrow will appear under the animation in the task pane. Click this to display all the elements separately. Each animation can be selected and each has its own dropdown. This means that you can allocate different effects to the different elements as well as change the options – such as the speed – of each animation. In the example below, we have changed animation 3 from ‘Fly in’ to ‘Float in’ and also used the Effect Options screen to change the speed from very fast to very slow. The time bar shows that the effect will take a lot longer than the other entrance effects.
In the above screen, we have also added an Emphasis and an Exit effect. At the risk of stating the obvious, Emphasis effects emphasise the elements once they have ‘entered’ and Exit effects animate their disappearance . We don’t want to change any of the individual emphasis effects so we haven’t expanded the list of animations. For the exit animation we will use ‘Fly out’ for symmetry with the Entrance ‘Fly in’. We can also choose to remove individual elements of the animation, so here we are about to remove the final exit effect, which applies to the chart background, so that the ‘empty’ chart will remain when the other animations have finished.
Copy and paste charts
If the chart that you want to use already exists in an Excel workbook then you can copy it and paste it into your presentation. Just right click in an empty area within the chart and choose ‘Copy’ from the shortcut menu. You can then just paste it into your presentation or use ‘Paste Special’ for more control over the format and to paste it as a linked object:
Just to prove the difference in animation between an unlinked and a linked object, in this example our top-left chart is not linked and we have animated each element as shown by the animation sequence numbers. Our bottom-right chart has been linked via Paste Special and when we display the animation Effects Options we can see that there is no ‘Chart animation’ tab available and only a single animation sequence number.
