PowerPoint 2010 - Omitting Objects Included in Animation Sequence

April 3, 2021 12:54 PM

I'm trying to animate a slide to have images and text appear on a mouse click. I thought I laid it out correctly in the animation pane/creator.... However, PowerPoint ignores some of the photos and text I included. Why is this happening, and what can I do to fix it? Googling hasn't been helpful. Link to screenshots below.

Program: PowerPoint 2010
Computer: circa 2013 Dell Laptop, now running Windows 10. I can update with more details if you need them.

Link to screenshots of problem. Enjoy part of my birding presentation!
Photo 1: Slide and animation pane. I would like each bird and its name to appear on a click. However....
Photo 2: 1st and 2nd click. (Robin photo and text remain hidden)
Photo 3: 3rd and 4th click. (Goose photo and text remain hidden)

Similar issues are happening with other slides in the presentation, too. And sometimes when I backtrack through the presentation, it overlays portions of the previous/upcoming slide on top of the current one.

I generally know what I'm doing with PowerPoint, but this has me stumped. It animated things perfectly for a presentation I gave in January. A person I share my laptop with (under a different user account) created a presentation with animations about a month ago, and that worked. I can get the presentation to work as intended if I use his account. Is there something wrong with my user account?

What I've tried:
Running the presentation on the other account on the computer. It works great! I'd rather use my account, though.
Restarting PowerPoint
Restarting computer
Making a brand new presentation. (Problems happen again, with different photos omitted.)
I'm not able to uninstall/reinstall, I don't have the codes/keys used years ago.

I'm stumped. I tried googling "power point ignores animation order" and "images disappear in animation power point", etc., but I'm not finding anything useful. Hive mind??

posted by Guess What to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Not sure why your animation is going wrong, but a quick, somewhat hacky workaround would be to remove all animation and duplicate the final version four times (should be an option if you right click on the slide in the slide preview pane). Then work backwards and just erase step 4 from the third slide copy, 3 and 4 from the second slide copy, and 2-4 from the first slide copy. (And maybe you also need an initial version with nothing visible?).

As far as I can tell this reproduces basic appearance-per-click animations pretty well, and it avoids fiddling with the animation setup.
posted by col_pogo at 1:54 PM on April 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I expected to find a mess (because nobody I know uses PPT correctly), but your objects are named, the green stars in your animation pane show correct entrances - it looks like it should work.

Only thing I think of is looking at your selection pane and checking to see there's no white shape hiding on the page obscuring your images coming in. (This doesn't explain why it works elsewhere of course).

Work around: put each bird on seperate slide filling the space completely, and with title in white on top, then you just click through each slide.

Maybe your computer is too old to cope :(
posted by b33j at 8:21 PM on April 3, 2021

Best answer: What happens if you create a new user account on the laptop and try to play your presentation from that account? If it works, I’d look at deleting the Microsoft settings in your account and see if that helps. (Doing that without an uninstall is challenging though, maybe better to just transition over to using the new account)
posted by dttocs at 4:28 AM on April 4, 2021