PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

Animate a table or chart in 2007

You may want to animate individual elements of a table such as rows, columns, or cells. PowerPoint lets you animate the entire table, but not its elements. Likewise, you may want to animated individual portions of a chart.

You can animate certain portions of a chart. For more information on that and on ungrouping a table in 2003, see my tip Animate a chart or table.

Here, I offer two methods.

Convert to WMF and ungroup

In order to animate individual elements of a table or chart, you need to ungroup it. However, PowerPoint 2007 no longer lets you ungroup them! For tables, apparently, this was required to allow larger table sizes, up to 75 rows by 75 columns.

Note: When you ungroup a table or chart, you lose effects and non-solid fills. Also, editing the contents of the table will be more difficult. You may want to make a copy of the slide first to retain the full table. You can hide the slide. To hide a slide in 2007, go to Slide Show tab> Set Up group> Hide Slide. Alternatively, you can copy the table itself and drag the copy off the slide.

Warning! Before doing this process, be sure to format the table or chart the way you want it, including the size of the text, the solid fills, and the borders. The process will convert the table to lots of individual objects and formatting them all is quite difficult.

Microsoft has provided a workaround for 2007. Here are the steps:

Select the table or chart and copy it to the Clipboard
Go to Home tab> Clipboard group and click the Paste down arrow. Choose Paste Special.
In the Paste Special dialog box, scroll down and choose Picture (Enhanced Metafile). This option results in a high-quality image. Click OK. Because the table was selected, the new pasted metafile replaces the original table. (A metafile is a vector type of image.)

With the table still selected, go to Picture Tools Format tab> Arrange Group> Group> Ungroup (or press Shift+Ctrl+G).
Click Yes to confirm converting the picture.

The table is now a grouped object, so you need to ungroup it again. Choose Picture Tools Format tab> Arrange Group> Group> Ungroup (or press Shift+Ctrl+G).

To get ready to animate the elements, first check out what you have. With a table, for example, depending on the formatting of the original table, you may have:

A rectangle around the entire table
Lines that create the borders along the rows and columns
Rectangles that create solid fills for the cells
Text boxes with the contents of each cell

You should group together elements that you want to animate together. Delete elements that you don't need. For example, you may not need the rectangle that borders the entire table, so you can select and delete it.

To group elements, select them and choose Drawing Tools Format tab> Arrange group> Group> Group (or press Ctrl+G). When you're doine grouping elements, you're finally ready to animate them.

Go to Animations tab> Animations group> Custom Animation.

In the Custom Aniatmion task pane, click Add Effect and choose the type of animation, then the specific effect that you want. Finally, adjust the parameters of the effect, such as the timing and how it starts. This table uses the Appear animation effect to animate each row of the table.

Selectively uncover the table

A trick that you can use instead of ungrouping the WMF is to cover each row with a rectangle, then add an exit animation. This works best for a table.

From the Shapes drop-down list on the Home tab, insert a rectangle to cover each row. Fill the rectangle with a background fill. To do this, right-click the rectangle and choose Format Shape. In the Fill category, choose Slide Background Fill. Set the line to No Line: In the Line Color category, choose No Line.

Select the uppermost rectangle and choose Animation tab> Custom Animation. Click Add Effect> Exit> Disappear. (If Disappear isn't on the list, click More Effects.) Repeat with the other rectangles.

When you go into Slide Show view, each click will uncover a successive row in the table.

Learn more about PowerPoint 2007

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