PowerPoint has some incredible animation tools. Incredibly frustrating, that is. One thing that’s eluded PowerPoint animators for years has been a way to loop an animation sequence on a slide. Friends, I’m happy to announce that the wait is over. I’ve learned of a way to cheat the system!
The problem with looping animations in PPT
A looped sequence is a repeating sequence. For example, a looping animation would go through Effect #1, then Effect #2, then Effect #3, then go back to Effect #1 and keep going until you tell it to stop. It seems like it would be super-simple to set something like this up in PowerPoint. Trust me, without knowing the trick I’m about to teach you, it’s a huge pain in the tuchus.
You see, the animation timeline in PowerPoint is stupid. It only travels from left to right, ever forward. There’s no way to isolate a set of animations, group them, and cause them to loop. So to create the illusion of looping, you’d have to repeat the animation sequence however many times you want it to loop. It can be a real drag, especially if you have a number of complicated animations, exact positioning, etc.
The answer? Bookmarks.
I’m a member of the Presentation Guild. One of the many benefits I enjoy as a member is access to the forum pages, where the best presentation designers share their ideas and inspirations. One of the Alpha Nerds, Jamie Garroch, developed an ingenious method of creating looping animations within PowerPoint by using something I’d never been aware existed: bookmarks.
A bookmark can be added to a video or audio file. Like bookmarks IRL, you can use these to mark interesting parts of the media. You can also use them to…wait for it…trigger animations! And the way to do it is to use bookmarks on an audio file you create that’s the same length as your desired animation loop.
How to create looping animations
Don’t be put off by the number of steps below. As with anything, writing out instructions takes much longer than actually doing it. If you’d rather learn by watching me do it, then watch this video.
You can download the PowerPoint file to see how it’s constructed.
Step 1: Create your animations
Create the animations you want on your slide. Wherever you want a bookmark to trigger an animation, select Start On Click. Use animation tools like After Previous, With Previous, Duration, Delay, etc., as you normally would.
Step 2: Make the audio file
- Under Media on the Insert tab, click Audio then Record audio.
- Click on the red dot (record) and remain silent for the length of your recording. The recording length is determined by how long you want the looping animation to be. When finished, click on the square (stop).
- Click on the audio file. Under Audio Options on the Playback tab, select Volume then select Mute. Also select Hide During Show, Start Automatically, and Loop Until Stopped.
Step 3: Add bookmarks
- Click on the audio clip.
- In the audio controls below the clip, click Play.
- When you reach the point where you want to make a bookmark, click Pause.
- Under Audio Tools, on the Playback tab, in the Bookmarks group, click Add Bookmark. Note that these bookmarks cannot be changed, only deleted and remade, so choose wisely!
- Make as many bookmarks as you have Start On Click animations.
Step 4: Use bookmarks to trigger animations
- In the Animation Pane, move your audio file to the top.
- Select the first animation that starts on click, then select On play…Recorded Sound – Bookmark 1 under Triggers.
- In the Animation Pane, move all of the animations that follow up until the next Start On Click animation to be after the triggered animation.
- Repeat steps 1–3 for as many Start On Click animations you have.
Step 5: Breaking the animation cycle
To get the animation cycle to stop and advance to the next slide, follow these steps:
- Click on the Transitions tab in the Ribbon.
- In the Timing section of the Transitions tab, deselect On Mouse Click
- Select After and set the amount of time you want to stay on the slide.
Thank you for writing this article. And, while Microsoft seems to have managed to disable this workaround, it got me on the right track to finding a workaround that still functions (as of Oct 2020). For the sake of simplicity I’ll assume the looping animation happens at the beginning of the deck, but the concept would hold up in other situations. Here is the process:
1. Create your animation in a slide (or even series of slides if you want to use the Morph transition)
2. Create your other slides in the presentation
3. In the Slide Show tab, use the Custom Show option to make one custom slideshow for your animation slide(s), and one for the slides after
4. In the Set Up Slide Show section, instead of All Slides, use your first custom slideshow, and set it to loop until esc, using timing if available. If you’ve set your animation slide(s)’s transition time to some number of seconds, at this point your presentation should just loop the animation indefinitely. Now you just need a way to advance to the next custom slideshow.
5. Create a button in your animation slides, and under Insert, use the Link option to link the button to your second custom slideshow. Make sure that button is present on each of your animation slides. It can even be transparent so it’s not distracting, but you would just need to click that button to exit your endless animation loop and proceed with the presentation.
If you wanted slides to precede the looping animation you would make a custom slideshow for those, and set the presentation to play that custom slideshow first. You’d then just add a button in the last of those slides that links you to the animation custom slideshow.
Shazam.
Tom, thank you so much for taking the time to write out the instructions for your clever workaround! This would definitely work for a looping animation at the beginning of a presentation, such as a “welcome” slide sequence before a meeting or presentation starts.
Hi Tom I’m new to this type of thing, so hope you can help. Lets say I have 10 slides. Numbers 1,3,5,7,9 all show the same message ie Please wait for your number to come on screen, wait to be called into the shop etc these messages are on bullet points scrolling left (I have created this slide) and each slide would be on continuous loop. Slides 2,4,6,8,10 are showing numbers ie 1,2,3,4,5.
Slide 1 would stay on screen (on scrolling loop) until the operator clicks the next slide no2, showing the number 1. When that customer has been served slide 3 is clicked with the scrolling bullet points and so on.
Many thanks
Peter
Hi, Peter! I think I know what you mean. Here’s how I set it up:
1. On Slide 1, create a text box with the text you want to continuously scroll.
2. Place that text box on the pasteboard to the left of the slide.
3. Apply the “Fly In””From Right” entrance animation to the text box. I set mine to 12 seconds.
4. Under Timing, select “Repeat: Until Next Click.”
5. Create Slide 2 and put your number on it.
6. Copy and paste these two slides until you have as many slides as you need.
Check out this file and see if it’s doing what you need it to: http://tiny.cc/ygt6tz
Hi,
Take a look at this tutorial on how to create moving images, pictures or shapes in PowerPoint, all using the free iSlide add-in of course.
https://islide-powerpoint.com/en/features-en/tween-en
Once you have worked with it,… You never want anything else!
With scroll bars, for Mac and Windows in 9 major languages!
Only needs an email address to register and get started.
Contact me if you have any questions at all.
Regards, Silvia
The tweening animation that iSlide provides looks promising! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, We do our best 🙂 Just give it a try,…
We are sure you will like it, and the other great features as well !
Brilliant! Works as of May 2024!