How can I animate a Powerpoint histogram ?

Nov 21, 2012

Hi everybody,

I'm experiencing a problem with a histogram that I created in Powerpoint, I want to animate each parts one after the other but when I import my slide in Storyline, I can't work on it because it became an image. My histogram is just an Excel chart, not a SmartArt one. Does anyone found a solution to animate charts piece by piece ?

Thanks in advance !

9 Replies
Mike Taylor

A couple of things you might try:

1.  You can copy your chart from Excel and do a Paste Special...Picture (Enhanced Metafile)

Then in PowerPoint you can ungroup that image to get the separate chart components. You might have to do the ungroup more than once and depending on your data you might need to try Switching the Row/Column setting in your source Excel chart. It looks like ungrouping will only get you each series as an animatable item.

2.  If that still doesn't get you where you want to be I've also manually traced the bars in PowerPoint with the chart image in the background to get each bar the right size...then just animated each shape as necessary. Obviously the more data you have the harder this route is but it's worked well for me in the past.

Good Luck! I hope you get what you need!

Sandrine Mis

Yes I have the chart tool tab but it doesn't allow me to separate each bar of my graph. In fact, I need to animate each bar one after the other, not just change their appearance or an other thing..
I would like to work on each bar as a separate object in order to be able to control the timing of its appearance on my slide

Graham North

To select an individual bar you need to click carefully.

One click will select all the bars in the series. A second click just the bar you are clicking on.  Unfortunately if you double click then a dialog will be displayed.

Copying the charts with one bar missing each time, in to Storyline will allow you animate the bar appearnace using the time line.  See attached file.

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