PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials
Animate a chart or tableYou may find it useful to animate the elements of a chart or table. For example, you may want to discuss sales of one product throughout all the quarters of the year before going on to the next product. Or you may want to explain a table row by row.
To add animation to charts, follow these steps:
- Choose Slide Show> Custom Animation (in 2007, Animations tab> Custom Animation).
- Select the chart and add animation as usual, by choosing Add Effect> Entrance>Wipe, for example. (If you don’t see the Wipe animation, choose More Effects.)
- Click the animation’s item in the task pane, and choose Effect Options.
- Click the Chart Animation tab.
- Use the drop-down list to animate the chart as one object, by series, by category, or by the elements in the series or category. Usually, one of these options is what you want.
You cannot animate part of a table in this way.
Because animating charts and tables does not break them up into individual objects, you cannot animate the individual elements in their original form. For example, you might want to animate the Axis labels of a chart so that they appear one by one, along with the bars. For that, you need to ungroup them.
To ungroup a chart or table in PowerPoint 2002/2003, select it, right-click it, and choose Grouping> Ungroup (for a chart) or Ungroup (for a table). At the message asking if you want to convert the chart or table, click Yes. Click the chart or table. If you don't see lots of objects, ungroup it again. You may want to regroup the elements that you're animating together.
Warning! When you ungroup a chart or table, it turns into a large number of individual objects and no longer functions like a chart or table. For a chart, you can't update it by changing the underlying data. You may also lose some formatting. You may want to make a copy of the slide first and hide that slide. To hide a slide, display it and choose Slide Show> Hide Slide. (In 2007, Slide Show tab> Set Up group> Hide Slide.) Alternatively, you can copy the chart or table itself and drag the copy off the slide.
Note: You cannot ungroup tables or charts in PowerPoint 2007. For a workaround, see Animate a table or chart in 2007.
Here you see a chart after displaying the first category and axis label.
The table shows the result after displaying the first three rows.
