Show Off Demo: Amazing Chart Animation

While presenting charts, it is good to have control over what you are going to show next. If the entire chart is shown, the audience interprets it the way they want and may interrupt your narrative.

To avoid that, learn this amazingly powerful feature, which is rotting deep down inside PowerPoint for almost 20 years now

The need

If you have many bullets and show all of them, the audience tends to read ahead. Once they think they have understood it, they either switch off mentally or ask questions impatiently about something which you were about to cover in your regular narrative.

We solve this problem by applying animation for the bullets. Now on every click the a new item is revealed.

Same requirement exists with charts. For example, if you want to show which product you use most, you may want to show other products first and then introduce the primary product…

Here are practical scenarios where you need more control over presenting charts.

1. Show performance by month or week
2. Compare last year with current year
3. Show data by quarter or H1/H2
4. Compare performance with competitor
5. Show individual pieces of the pie to highlight the contribution
6. Show the fluctuation across time and compare between two series
7. Show clustering in a scatter chart
8. Show overlapping regions in an area chart
9. Run and rerun the pattern to understand correlations between data points

The solution is so simple – you will curse yourself for not knowing it

Add a chart, add the relevant animation and choose Effect Options – By Category.

Now you will need to click once for each piece of pie. You can control the order by reordering the animation. Choose a different animation effect if you want. Use emphasis and exit effects as required. You have full control.

There is another way of controlling the animation. Open Animations tab – Animation Pane.

You will see just one entry for an animation for a chart initially. Open the dropdown and choose Effect Options.

Click on the tab Chart Animation. Open the dropdown there. Choose by Category. Now you will get one animation applied to each piece of pie chart.

It is a good idea to deselect the checkbox as shown below. There is no benefit of animating the grid (not applicable for pie charts).

These options change depending upon the type of chart. For example, a column chart has these options…

Tweaking the chart animation in the Animation Pane

All the animation applied is hidden to avoid clutter. Notice the double down arrow.

Download the presentation and show off your skills

Run the presentation first. See it. Then go to each slide, open the animation pane and understand how the settings were changed to achieve the desired effect.

Finally, apply this concept to relevant charts in your presentations.

—   —