Animate Your PowerPoint Charts
True PowerPoint Warriors know that you can -- with Herculean levels of effort -- animate charts and graphs in PowerPoint. Of course, not many people do it, because it's just not that easy to do. What if I could offer you a PowerPoint plug-in that made animated charts as easy as pie?
It would be a game-changer, right? You could spiff up your run-of-the-mill presentations with charts and graphs that sprang to life when you displayed the slide. Well, here you go: Oomfo is a free plug-in that creates animated charts for PowerPoint.
After you install oomfo, you can find it in the Insert tab of Office 2007 or 2010 or in the Insert menu of Office 2003. Choose to insert a chart, and oomfo open its own window where you can choose from about 18 different kinds of charts, such as bar, area, line, radar, and more.
You can enter (or paste) your data and be done with it, but there's no need to accept the default settings. oomfo lets you customize just about every aspect of the chart you can imagine, including titles, color schemes, number formats, and grid lines.
The animations are gorgeous, giving the impression you put way more time and effort into the project than you really did. And even after the animation is complete, the charts keep on giving; when you mouse over data points, tooltips identify salient values -- excellent if you are speaking to the data.
And don't worry about these oomfo charts not playing well with PowerPoint; the chart is fully resizable, can be edited afterwards, and can even be exported out of PowerPoint as a still image.
Perhaps best of all, your audience probably hasn't seen these slides a million times before, so you'll score points for originality. If you give a lot of PowerPoint presentations, definitely check out oomfo. [via Digital Inspiration]
Here are some other PowerPoint tips you might find helpful on this Presentation Thursday:
