Remove Animations in PowerPoint 2007, 2003, and 2002 for Windows

Before you start with removing an animation, there is something you need to decide:

Do you want to remove both the animation and the slide object that is animated?
Or do you want to just remove the animation, and let the slide object be?
Or maybe you don't want to remove the animation or the slide object -- you just want to change the animation?

Here are the answers:

If you chose 1, then you need not read the rest of this tutorial -- just delete the slide object such as a shape, and any animation added to that object is gone too.
If you chose 2, then you need to read the rest of this page.
If you chose 3, then look at our Changing an Animation tutorial.

Now that we have established what you want to do, removing an animation is very easy. Follow these steps to remove any existing animation:

Select the object that has an animation applied to it.
Now make sure that the Custom Animation Task Pane is visible, as shown in Figure 1. If this Task Pane is not visible, you won't be able to see or select any animations, or remove them.

For PowerPoint 2007 users, make sure that the shape is still selected, then activate the Animations tab of the Ribbon. Next click the Custom Animation button to bring up a Task Pane of the same name that you can see in Figure 1. Remember, this is a toggle option: click once to show the Custom Animation Task Pane, and click again to hide it!

Users of earlier PowerPoint versions (PowerPoint 2002 and 2003) can again make sure that their shape is selected. Then they should choose Slide Show | Custom Animation to access a similar Task Pane (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Custom Animation Task Pane
Next you need to select the animation you want to remove. These can be found in the Custom Animation Task Pane, as shown earlier in Figure 1.
With the animation selected, just click the Remove button, as shown in Figure 2. This removes the animation from the selected slide object.

Figure 2: Remove
Your slide object may have more than one animation, and you may have more slide objects with animations applied to them. All these animations show up in the Custom Animation Task Pane. To remove any of these, just select them and repeat Step 4 above.
Save your presentation.

Tip: Do you want to remove all animations from your slides? Is there a magic button somewhere in PowerPoint that can get rid of all animations all together? Yes, you can do this easily in PowerPoint using some simple VBA code, says John Wilson -- read more.