A new way to animate your content in PowerPoint for the web

(Originally published on March 11, 2024 by Amya Rai, Lakshay Gupta, and Dhruv Dahiya)

Hey, Microsoft365 Insiders! We are Amya Rai, a Product Designer, Lakshay Gupta, a Product Manager, and Dhruv Dahiya, a Product Manager, on the PowerPoint team. We’re happy to share improvements that will help you make your slides more visually appealing and more understandable using animations.

A new way to animate your content in PowerPoint for the web 

Through research, we have learned that the current animation creation workflow can be quite daunting and that many of you expect it to be less time consuming and easier to follow. Based on that feedback, we’ve updated the workflow to meet these 3 basic goals: 

Goals: 1) Intuitive 2) quick & efficient and 3) simple workflow

How it works

1. Open an existing presentation and select an object you want to animate.
2. Select Animations > Animation Pane.
3. In the Animation pane, click the Add Animation button.

   Adding an animation

4. In the animation card for the selected object, edit the animation properties as needed. 

   Animation card

5. To add more than one animation to the selected object, click the Add button at the top of the task pane and notice that corresponding cards are added to the Animations pane.

   Add more animations

6. To delete an applied animation, click the Delete icon in the top right corner of the corresponding card.

   Delete an animation

7. To reorder animations, select the six-dots (reordering dots) icon in the top-left of the card and drag the card to place the selected animation in a new position.

   Reorder animations

Tips and tricks

• You can also animate an object by right-clicking it and selecting Add Animation from the shortcut menu.

  Menu option to add animations

• The various categories of animations are divided into three categories – Entrance, Exit, and Emphasis – which can be accessed by selecting View more animations in the card. 

  Animation categories

• You can add a default animation to multiple objects at once by selecting them and then clicking the Add button. Alternatively, you can right-click all of the selected objects and select Add Animation in the shortcut menu.

  Add multiple animations

Coming Soon

We will soon enable you to get a sneak-peek at your applied animation using a Preview button. After selecting the button, you will be able to navigate through the animation by clicking anywhere on the slide or pressing the Enter and arrow keys as well as the spacebar.

Preview animations

Availability

These features are available to all PowerPoint for the web users except Preview, which should be available soon.

Feedback 

We’d love to hear from you! To submit feedback, please select Help > Feedback in PowerPoint on the web and let us know what you think! 

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