The Curious Power of the PowerPoint Morph Transition

 I've made many a PowerPoint presentation in my time and one feature that always seems to have a wow factor is the Morph Transition.  

Here's a super-simple example in action:

People say "Wow, you got objects to fly around the screen, that must be super complex to do".  Not so; I shall explain how.

So how do you do this?  Super, super easy.  First prepare your "base" slide, the slide that other slides will transition from.  Here's a simple example!

With this slide selected on the slide picker on the left, select the "Transitions" menu and the "Morph" transition as shown below.

Right click on the slide in the slide picker on the left and select "Duplicate Slide" to create a second copy of the slide:

Now edit this second slide by moving and re-sizing the drawing objects:

Put the presentation in slideshow mode, go from the base slide to the next slide and you can see how PowerPoint automatically animates the transition.

This has been an example using made up PowerPoint objects (and ugly ones at that!).  However in my working life I often use this Morph technique to tell a story during technical presentations.  

Say I want to describe a computer system with 4 sub-systems.  I would:

• Prepare a slide with sub-system 1 on it.  The slide has graphic for sub-system 1 and a text description.
• I add a Morph Transition to slide 1 and duplicate it.
• On slide 2 I shrink sub-system 1, show sub-system 2, show how sub-system 1 connects to sub-system 2 and describe sub-system 2.
• Repeat for sub-system 3 on slide 3 and sub-system 4 on slide 4.
• Create slide 5 with all the systems together and a final message.

Real easy but has a big wow-factor.