What About Animating A Chart?
If a chart is pasted as a picture, it can only be animated as a single object any effects are applied to the entire picture.
On the other hand, if you used a regular MSGraph chart or if the chart is pasted as an Excel object, individual series and data points within the chart can be animated. To apply animation, right-click the chart and select Custom Animation. In the Custom Animation task pane, add an effect. Then, right-click the chart in the Custom Animation task pane and choose Effect Options. Notice there is a new tab called Chart Animation. This tab has two options: Group Chart or Animate Grid and Legend.
The options under Group Chart select how much of the chart this animation is applied to. Depending on the animation effect chosen , the animation is applied to the whole chart, to individual series or categories, or to elements of series or categories.
Available animation effects for charts depend on the kind of chart chosen. Some effects are not available on 3D charts; others are not available on pie charts . Animation of individual elements of a series is also available on only some of the chart types.
PowerPoint won't animate certain elements of a series and not others without using a bit of animation trickery . If several of the animations occur together (with previous or 0 seconds after previous), it will create the effect of several items animating together. You can also ungroup the chart and animate the individual elements.
If you do ungroup the chart, make sure there is an untouched copy of the chart stored somewhere else. When ungrouping the chart, it will disconnect from the Excel spreadsheet or MSGraph datasheet. If changes are made to the Excel data after ungrouping, the data changes won't show in the chart. You will need to:
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Delete the animated chart
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Update the data in the chart copy
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Copy the updated chart
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Paste the new chart in
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Ungroup the new chart
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Re-set your animation
You will find for most charts it takes longer to describe this process than it does to do it.
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There are times when you don't want to bring over charts from Excel, but instead the actual data, This is done with copy and paste just as with the charts. However, there are circumstances where you won't get all of the data.
When you copy and paste data from Excel, only certain amounts of it are pasted into PowerPoint. It seems to be tied to the size of the data, not the amount of data. If trying to paste an area of Excel data larger than about 13 inches in either direction, the data may be cut off. If you can make the Excel data fit in a smaller area by reducing the font size, it will paste just fine. Once pasted into PowerPoint, readjust the font size back up to large enough to see.
Quite a bit of research has been done on this problem as it relates to the various versions of Windows and PowerPoint. If you want to read more, feel free to check out the PowerPoint FAQ entry at:
http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00068.htm
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So What Did Lydia Do?
Lydia linked to the Excel object by copying her charts and using Edit ’ Paste Special ’ Paste Link (Microsoft Office Excel Chart Object) so she could make any last-minute updates to the corporate data right up to distribution day. When she was ready to send out the presentations, she broke the links leaving her with pictures of the graphs. By doing this, she not only shrunk the size of the PowerPoint file, she also was able to keep the data safe from changes by the branches.
