Create cool animation with Morph in Office 365

Earlier this year, Microsoft unveiled new new features for PowerPoint, Morph and Designer. Here, I want to discuss Morph and focus on effects that you can’t create with PowerPoint’s animation feature.

How you get access to Morph

Unfortunately, not everyone can get Morph. You need Office 365: If you are paying a monthly subscription for Office 2016 at a level that gives you PowerPoint, you have Office 365. If you or your company bought a permanent version with a one-time payment, you don’t.

How to use Morph in Office 365

Using Morph is very easy:

1. Create a slide with some objects on it.
2. Duplicate the slide and change the objects. You can move them, change their properties, and even add or delete objects. (Added or deleted objects are faded in or out in the animation.) Note that you don’t HAVE to duplicate the first slide, but it’s usually easier than creating the second slide from scratch.
3. On the second slide, click the Transitions tab and choose the Morph transition. Yes, Morph is a transition.

Many of the changes you can create with Morph you can create with animation, such as moving objects, changing their size, and changing their color. But you might find Morph easier, especially  for short animations.

However, Morph can make changes that you can’t do with regular animation and I’ll focus on those.

Morph isn’t as good as Flash in interpolating the animation and sometimes it gets confused. Sometimes, it just fades out the first slide and fades in the second. But other times, you get an awesome effect! You just have to play with it to see what works best.

Change 3D format and rotation

This feature is very cool and you can’t do anything similar with regular animation. I cover 3D rotation in another blog post here. I cover 3D format in part here. Besides the effect in the video, you can add or change a shadow or bevel.

Watch this short video to see an example.

Change font, font style (bold/italic), and font size

You can create great effects with text that you can’t create with animation. For example, you can change the font, the font style, and size. Regarding size, in regular animation, if you try to use the Grow/Shrink animation, PowerPoint pixelates the text horribly.

Watch this short video example.

Flip objects horizontally or vertically

Sometimes, Morph’s effects look a little like fading out and in, but flipping objects is awesome. Here, I flip an arrow from left facing to right facing.

Change the shape of objects

You can morph the shape of objects using 2 techniques:

• Use the adjustment handle on the second slide to adjust the shape. You’d be surprised what you can do with these handles. For example, you can turn a rounded rectangle into a circle.
• Use Edit Points to adjust the shape. If you use this technique, it’s recommended to keep same number of points in both versions of the shape. I explain how to use this feature here.