Powerpoint '02 drops animation on ungroup.

[Doug Little]

Hi,

I'm running into a very annoying pp feature and want to
know if there is a workaround.

I have a presentation of about 60 pages that has extensive
animation (Fade in/outs). On many of the pages, I have
several boxes and make use of autoshape connectors to draw
lines between them. I want a box and it's associated
lines to fade in together. In order to use the Fade
in/out, I need to group the box & line and then apply a
custom animation to the group. so far so good.

Unfortunately, if I need to move 1 of the box/line groups
the line doesn't automatically redraw between the anchor
points, instead it just moves the end off the object. If
I ungroup the objects, the autoshape connector immediately
(by itself) reattaches to the anchor). After the update,
I can then regroup and the diagram looks great.

Now the annoying part, When I ungroup the custom
animation is deleted, and not automatically created when I
regroup. I need to manually rebuild the animation. While
it only take a minute or 2, it's a pain when I have to do
it on every single slide for any change I make.

Does anyone know of a workaround that might help?

THanks
Doug

 

[David M. Marcovitz]

What version of PowerPoint are you using. In 2002 and 2003, you don't
need to group objects to get them to animate together. You can set an
animation effect to happen "with previous" so it happens at the same time
as the previously animated thing.
--David

--
David M. Marcovitz, Ph.D.
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technology
Loyola College in Maryland
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.loyola.edu/education/PowerfulPowerPoint/

 

[Guest]

David,
I'm using PP 2002 sp2 on XP.

Thanks for the tip. seems to work much better.

 

[Guest]

David and Pdek are both correct, and I see their tips have helped.

I'd like to recommend Shyam's Animation Carbon, though. I had about 40 slides to apply a complicated series of animations to today, and being able to replicate that at the click of a button saved me literally hours. http://www.mvps.org/skp/ac/index.html

You should be able to use this to pick up the animations on one of your groups and then reapply it to the regrouped objects later.

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com
presenter, PPT Live '04
Oct 10-13, San Diego http://www.powerpointlive.com