Powerpoint hack for tech presenters

Often when you are building a slides for a presentation you need to animate something on screen to show its transition from one state to another.

For example, for a presentation I recently gave in India, I needed to show the state of rows in a block when that block was sparsely populated

but I wanted to then animate the transition of those rows to their final state of being densely packed within a block after an “alter table shrink space” command

After 30mins of trying to add Motion Path animations to every single red box representing a row, and trying to get those paths to all align both horizontally and vertically, I was ready to pull my hair out.

Then I stumbled upon the “Morph” slide transition.  Rather than trying to achieve animation on a single slide, put your starting state on one slide and your final state on the next slide. Then choose the Morph slide transition and then Powerpoint will take on the job of trying to intelligently move the objects on the slide from the starting state to the final desired state.

Here’s a quick GIF of that process on the two slides above

Occasionally it loses the plot and you have to go back to first principles, but most of the time it gives a nice smooth result, even for pictures.