Adding animated pictures to PowerPoint Presentations Tech Tips by Donald Burleson

It's often very handy to have animations inside a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate a complex interaction, but creating animated slides for PowerPoint can be very confusing.  After wasting an hour with the PowerPoint animation feature it became clear that this PowerPoint feature is not animating text and pictures, and not for "playing" an animation within a PPT slide.

Here is my approach to adding animated illustrations to PowerPoint presentations.  It involves using PowerPoint to create each "slide" for an animated gif, and once the animated gif is created, pasting it into the "real" PowerPoint presentation.

1 - Download the Microsoft gif animator tool

2 - Draw your illustration in PowerPoint, saving each image, and then "insert --> duplicate slide" to get the starting point for the next image:

3 - Open the MS gif animator.

4 - Starting with the LAST PPT slide in your deck, copy the PowerPoint image and paste it into MS-Word, or Photoshop to convent it into a paste-able image.  Then re-copy the image:

 

5 - Working backwards from the last picture, paste the image into the MS gif animator.  In the animation tab, set "looping, repeat forever":

6 - After you have pasted-in a few images, save the animated gif and test it in your browser:

7 - Once the animated gif is complete, you can paste it directly into your PowerPoint by choosing (insert --> picture --> from file).

Here are some samples:

Oracle Parallel Query Illustration

Oracle full-table scan Illustration

Oracle Index access illustration

Disk enqueues can occur when the disk is unable to quickly service concurrent requests.  Super-large disks can be problematic, and the most popular Oracle data files can be placed on the middle absolute track of the device to minimize read-write head movement.

You want to place your "hot" data files near the middle absolute track: