TutorialsPowerPoint tricks

On this page, we collect some tricks and best practices for working with Microsoft PowerPoint. Confirmed for Office 365, Version 2202, build 14931.20646.

Morph

Morph is a slide transition that tries to interpolate between two slides. It can be used to easilly create animations between objects. Its only downside is that the slide count goes up.

• Movement: Any object that is on one position on the first slide and a different position on the second will move in a straight line between these positions. Any of these two positions can be off-slide, such as to make the object appear to fly in or out of the screen.

• Scaling: If the same object appears on the two slides with a different scaling, it will be scaled appropriately.

• Images: If the same image is contained on two consecutive slides with different crops, morph will try to morph between them. Two different images can morph into each other. Morph tries to find a part of the images that looks somewhat similar, moves the first image to make that part overlap and morph to the second.

Because an object needs to be present on both slides for movement to happen, it might be useful to add a mask to one of the slides to make certain objects dissappear/appear, by covering an object with an shape of the exact same color as the background. It might sometimes be necessary to make a slide directly transition into another by going to Transitions → Advance Slide and select After, with some duration.

Wrong objects morphed

Each object on the first slide is mapped to an object on the second slide. Internally, PowerPoint stores identifiers for each object. The mapping is based on a magic combination of similarity between the objects, position on the slide, and these identifiers, in that order.

For example, consider the first slide with a triangle on the left and a circle on the right, and a second slide with the objects swapped. Morph will move the objects, and not transform the circle in the triangle and vice versa. It is possible to force morph to morph one object into another, irrespective of their position and or similarity. To do this, go to Home → Select → Selection Pane... and add two exlamation marks in front of the name. The name should be exactly the same for both objects. This works most of the time. If it does not, it helps if the name contains no spaces and the objects are similar.

!!circle

Text morphing

By default, morph acts on complete objects, so a complete textbox. Morphing between words or even individual characters is possible. For example to make a new bullet point appear, or rearrange the variables in a formula. To achieve this, go to Transitions → Effect Options, and select either Words or Characters.

Wipe in arbitrary directions

Some animations work with relative coordinates. For example, a wipe from left to right, following a 90 degree rotation clockwise, will result in a wipe from top to bottom. This can be used to make these animations happen in arbitrary directions, by prepending them with a 0.01s rotation.