Spice up your PowerPoint Chart's With Animations

I had the opportunity to attend some Excel\PowerPoint training yesterday.  Where I work, a number of employee's use Excel extensively to generate business insight from our Data Cubes via Excel, in which these numbers are thrown into varying levels of documents, charts, graph's and presentations.

The course covered a number of advanced learning topics, but we kind of "played around" some when it came to the topics too, and our instructor gave us a cool tip about PowerPoint and charts.. something that I'm kind of shocked I never stumbled across in the past.

So let's start here, let's say you are developing a presentation, and you need to show some data in a graphical format.  In the end, you come up with something similar to the following:

Not too bad, right?  This is your standard "3D" bar chart whipped up in a few minutes within PowerPoint, basic stuff here.  Now, here's the cool trick, you can animate the chart when it's presented.

So, selecting our chart in PowerPoint, choose the Add Animation feature, and add an animation.. I'll use Wipe.  Now, with your animation added, navigate to the Animation Pane.

Right click the animation you just added, and choose "Effect Options..."  In the resulting dialogue box, choose "Chart Animation", and changed the value of the Group Chart drop down to a different value, here I'll choose "By Series"

What does this do?  Well, let me show you how this can spice up your chart!  Now, when presenting this chart, you can animate each individual series step as it is presented:

I just thought this was a cool, and simple, way of adding some pop to a presentation... I hope you feel the same!