Adding Animation in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

PowerPoint allows you to animate any slide object that can be selected on your slide. Such objects include pictures, shapes, text, bulleted lists, SmartArt graphics, charts, etc. You can tweak the way objects on your slides appear, move, and disappear only after adding animation to the particular slide object -- follow these steps to add animation to a shape in PowerPoint 2013:

Open a new presentation, and insert a shape. Or open any existing presentation you have, and select an unanimated slide object to which you want to add animation. Figure 1, below shows a Star shape is selected -- with the shape selected, click the Animations tab of the Ribbon (highlighted in red within Figure 1).

Figure 1: Animations tab of the Ribbon

Note: Although we are using a shape within this example, the same technique will work to add animation to any slide object within PowerPoint.
Within the Animations tab, click the Add Animation button (highlighted in red within Figure 2).

Figure 2: Add Animation button
This opens the Add Animation drop-down gallery, as shown in Figure 3. Within this gallery, you'll find four animation types: Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Paths. If you cannot see all animations, especially the Motion Path animation types, you can scroll down to see them all.

Figure 3: Add Animation drop-down gallery
Within the Add Animation drop-down gallery, click any of the animation effect thumbnails to apply the animation to the selected slide object. For this tutorial, we chose the Zoom animation effect (highlighted in red within Figure 4) within the Entrance animation type, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Zoom animation effect selected

This will cause the selected slide object to animate once, so as to preview the selected animation as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Shape animating immediately after animation is added

Tip: If you don't want the slide object to animate as soon as animation is added, then turn off the Animation Preview feature.
If you want to explore more Entrance animation effects, select the More Entrance Effects option within the Add Animation drop-down gallery (highlighted in red within Figure 3, earlier on this page).
This launches the Add Entrance Effect dialog box as shown in Figure 6. Within this dialog box, the Entrance animation effects are grouped into four different categories named Basic, Subtle, Moderate, and Exciting. Select any one of these Entrance animation effects and click the OK button to apply it to the selected shape. As you can see in Figure 6, we have selected the Wheel effect (highlighted in red within Figure 6) in the Basic category -- you can also see the live preview of the animation effect on the selected shape in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Add Entrance Effect dialog box

Note: To view the live preview of the animation effect, the Preview Effect check-box within Add Entrance Effect dialog box should be selected as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 6. If the Add Entrance Effect dialog box overlaps the slide object, you can't see the effect of the selected animation -- so, it is a good idea to place the dialog box in a position that is a little offset from the animated slide object on the slide.
You can add animation types other than Entrance in the same way. Just choose the relevant animation effect for Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Path animations.

Tip: If your slide has more than one slide object, you can also add animation effects for all of them using the same process -- remember that any animation added first will play first -- and any animations added thereafter will play in the same sequence as you added them -- you can also change the animation sequence, learn more in our Re-Order Animations in PowerPoint 2013 tutorial.

Now that you have added an animation to a slide object, you can control more animation properties like event and speed.