Animate a table or chart in PowerPoint 2007 & later

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.

Note: Charts have their own animation settings, which may work fine for you. If they do, you don’t need to use one of the methods below. Select the chart and add an animation, such as Appear. In the Custom Animation task pane/Animation pane, click the animation’s down arrow and choose Effect Options. On the Chart Animation tab, choose one of the options from the Group Chart drop-down list.

For more information on ungrouping a table in 2003 and the chart animation settings, see my tip Animate a chart or table.

Here, I offer two methods of animating a table in PowerPoint 2007 and 2010.

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.

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 and 2010, go to Slide Show tab> Set Up group> Hide Slide. Alternatively, you can copy and paste 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.

Here are the steps for PowerPoint 2007 and later:

1. Select the table or chart and cut it to the Clipboard (Ctrl+X).
2. Go to Home tab> Clipboard group and click the Paste down arrow. Choose Paste Special.
3. In the Paste Special dialog box, scroll down and choose Picture (Windows Metafile) or Picture (Enhanced Metafile). A metafile is a vector type of image.  Click OK.

The Paste Special dialog box

4. Move the table to where you want it.
5. The table is now a grouped object, so you need to ungroup it. Right-click and choose Group> Ungroup (or press Shift+Ctrl+G).
6. Click Yes to confirm converting the picture.
7. Then ungroup the table a second time.

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 right-click. Choose Group> Group (or press Ctrl+G). When you’re done grouping elements, you’re finally ready to animate them. Select the element you want to animate and follow the steps below.

For PowerPoint 2007:

1. Go to Animations tab> Animations group> Custom Animation.
2. In the Custom Animation task pane, click Add Effect> Entrance and choose the type of animation, then the specific effect that you want.
3. Adjust the parameters of the effect, such as the timing and how it starts.

For PowerPoint 2010 and 2013:

1. Go to Animations tab and click Add Animation.
2. From the Entrance section, choose the type of animation you want.
3. 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.

appear animation effect