When working on creating a presentation, one of your primary concerns is likely trying to keep the attention of your audience — especially if you’re working with a dense subject matter. It can be challenging to keep an audience engaged during your speech. If you want to make a connection that lasts during the entirety of your presentation, it’s a good idea to add a GIF to PowerPoint to add some comic relief!
When you insert a GIF into PowerPoint, you change the dynamic of your presentation. You go from being a lecturer that follows a slow, scripted presentation to a presenter that thinks about every aspect of the material they are covering and knows how to handle a crowd.
Using a PowerPoint, GIF sets you apart from the rest of your colleagues—so you must know how to use it!
If you already have a GIF that's perfect for your presentation, inserting it into PowerPoint is a snap. Just open your PowerPoint project and select the slide that you want to add a GIF to. Click the Insert tab of the ribbon and select "Pictures." When the Insert Picture dialog box opens, select the folder containing your GIF, then choose the GIF file and click "Open." The GIF should now appear in your slide, but it won't be animated while you're editing the slide.
To test the GIF's animation, click the "Slide Show" icon at the bottom of the window. Alternatively, click the Slide Show tab in the ribbon and then select "From Current Slide" in the Start Slide group. To cancel the slide show preview, press Esc on your keyboard.
If you don't have a GIF that's just quite right for your presentation, it's pretty easy to find one online. There are thousands of animated GIFs to choose from. A quick search on Google images, including the keyword "GIF" should do the job.
Alternatively, you can find one within PowerPoint by selecting "Online Pictures" from the Insert tab of the ribbon. This option uses Bing Image search and gives you the choice to search only images that are licensed through Creative Commons, so you won't have to worry about violating copyright laws if you're publishing your presentation online.
An animated GIF is basically a mini-movie, composed of at least two images in separate frames. The number of frames determines how much animation is in the GIF, while the number of times the frames will loop determines how long the GIF's image will be animated.
Most GIFs are designed to loop continuously, which could be distracting in a PowerPoint presentation. If you would prefer the animation to stop after some amount of time, you can do that using any online GIF editor. Microsoft recommends using a website like ezgif.com. Other websites are gifmaker.org and giphy.com. These websites also give you the ability to make your own GIFs, cut from videos or made by assembling a series of images together.
Upload the GIF to the website and click the "Split to Frames" button. This reveals each frame used to animate the image. Click the "Edit Animation" button. Click the "Loop Count" box and enter the number of times you want the GIF to loop through its frames and then click the "Make a GIF" button. Click the "Save" button.
Once the GIF is downloaded to your computer, you can then insert it into a PowerPoint slide.
Just like any other image you insert into a slide, you can move and resize a GIF as needed. To move the image, drag it with your mouse. To resize the GIF without distorting its aspect ration, drag any corner while holding down the Shift key. You can even rotate the image by dragging the circular anchor above the image.
If you click the Format tab in the ribbon while the image is selected, you'll see several other options for adding effects to the image. You can add a border, add shadows inside or outside of the image, or even add a reflection of the image below it using the
Most of the formatting changes won't affect the GIF's animation. However, some effects, like adding a bevel to the image or using one of the 3-D Rotation options will cancel the animation, making the GIF just a still image.
It’s that simple! All it takes is a little creativity and some placement skills to make your PowerPoint presentation from a mediocre informative session to an excellent experience! Just keep in mind: PowerPoint is the tool – great content & delivery is the rule! Not only is PowerPoint a healthier program today, but productivity solutions like DeckRobot increased its worth many times over.
