Wondering How To Animate Excel Charts In Powerpoint?
The creation process starts with your Excel data. Excel has it’s own features and chart-output capabilities – however, these are not animated and are quite limited on matching brand colors and style.
This is where exporting your data into a still graph (screenshot or image file typically) and then adding some graphic design magic before animating can be engaging and powerful.
If you’re going to do this yourself, here’s what you’ll need:
- Original Excel Data
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe After Effects
(turning excel data into video format)
Excel Graphs To Powerpoint
This post talks about the process of animating your excel charts and graphs and importing them into PowerPoint. The video above is the final output of the screenshots and data below. Questions welcome and free mockups available upon request.
- Turning Raw Data Into Charts
- Choosing Chart Style
- How I Create Data Animations
- Prep For Powerpoint
- Import To Powerpoint
- Animate Your Chart (Free Mockup)
Start With Your Data: Excel
Excel Spreadsheet & Columns
Excel can be used to graph sales metrics, marketing data and tons of personal information as well.
Whether you’re working with a few rows or hundreds of Excel rows, make sure your columns are labelled and ready to go.
In this example, we’ll be using some generic data, the exported stock prices of GoDaddy web hosting. The green highlights in column “B” are simply for me to get a sense of where the high and low values are (using Microsoft Excel’s conditional formatting feature) but that’s irrelevant to the post here.
Export To Chart Using Excel
Plot & Graph Your Data Points
Next we’re going to use Excel’s data chart feature to export our data to a graph. If you don’t know how to do this, follow the steps below.
Within Excel, select the columns of data that you’d like to be graphed. In this example, I’m selecting Columns A and B. These are the dates and closing price for the day. The columns or cells that you choose to select will of course vary and the columns may not be directly next to each other.
(If the columns don’t happen to be right next to each other within Excel, you can click while holding the “control” key)
Export Your Graph: Choose Your Style
Once the columns are selected, click on the “insert” tab within the top navigation menu (see highlighted areas within the screenshot above). Then, move your mouse over to the “charts” section of the dropdown that appears after clicking on “insert.” Choose the type of graph that you’d like to be created within Excel. For this graph I’ve chosen a line graph.
When I initially created this graph the data was charted backwards (i.e. the horizontal Axis showed the dates in descending order vs. going up in dates over time). This was an easy fix: right click on the horizontal axis of your graph and click on the “format axis” option. This new window (shown in the screenshot below) will appear and all you have to do is click on “categories in reverse order.”
Export Graph For Animation
Upload To Your Favorite Animation Software
Congrats, the layout of your graph is ready to go! Depending on the types of software that you have access to or know how to use, you’ll find yourself at a crossroads.
The method I’m using is to use Adobe After Effects to essentially “draw on” the components to be animated. While this is not a full in-depth tutorial on After Effects infographic animation (as that would take a library to detail each step), I’ll condense the steps below:
1. Save the previous graph from excel as an image
2. Import the image into After Effects for “reference”
3. Use a combination of shapes and text based animations to recreate the graph to match the picture exactly.
4. Export To Video
Export & Import Video For Powerpoint
Save In Video Format
Now, depending on how you’ve gone and recreated the individual components within your graph you’ll be almost ready to import the finalized animation into PowerPoint.
For this example after I had recreated the Excel chart inside After Effects I exported the finalized animation in .MP4 format (very friendly for PowerPoint).
Next, after you’ve saved the final video to your computer, navigate back over to PPT.
What you’ll want here is a slide that supports multimedia, specifically a video format. On the top navigation menu, click on “insert,” then navigate to one of the slides that already has a placeholder for media content (this is just one way to do this of course).
I’ve highlighted the buttons to look for in the attached screenshot.
Insert Animated Graph To Powerpoint
Locate File For New Slide
After inserting a new slide that supports multimedia format, click on the video icon (highlighted here) within the content area of the slide. A new popup will appear on your computer, prompting you to select your file.
Navigate to the newly-created Excel chart animation and click on the insert button within the popup.
Excel Spreadsheet Animation!
The video will now appear within the slide and you can configure as you’d like (options to autoplay, click to play, etc.). Congrats! You’re Excel animation will now appear within your PowerPoint presentation.
Animate Your Excel Data
Animate Your Charts and graphs
Don’t know how to use After Effects or actually go about the animation process? Click through the button below to start animating your data.
