PowerPoint Tips & Tutorials

You 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.

You can add animation to charts. Bar charts look good with a wipe up or wipe right effect.  Choose Slide Show< Custom Animation and click the Chart Effects 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.

However, because charts and tables are not broken up into individual objects, you cannot animate the individual elements in their original form. For example, you might want to animate the Axis labels so that they appear one by one, along with the bars. For that, you need to ungroup them.

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.

To ungroup a chart or table, 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. (The message is slightly different, depending on which you choose.) Click the chart or table. If you don't see lots of objects, again ungroup it. You may want to regroup the elements that you're animating together. Then add animation to the objects as desired.

Note: You cannot ungroup tables in PowerPoint 2007. For a workaround, see Animate a table in 2007.

Here you see a chart after displaying the first category amd axis label.

The table shows the result after displaying the first three rows.

back to main tips menu for more tips