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Animated GIFs can be funny and a lot of fun. Even in a business presentation, a well-placed GIF can help refocus your audience's attention to emphasize an important point. Whether you already have a GIF you'd like to add to a slide, or are still fishing for ideas, inserting one into PowerPoint point takes just a minute. Just be careful if you are adding effects to the GIF – bevels and 3-D rotations can make the animation crash.
Inserting a GIF in PowerPoint
If you already have a GIF that's perfect for your presentation, inserting it into PowerPoint is a snap. Just open your PowerPoint project and select the slide that you want to add a GIF to. Click the Insert tab of the ribbon and select 'Pictures.' When the Insert Picture dialog box opens, select the folder containing your GIF, then choose the GIF file and click 'Open.' The GIF should now appear in your slide, but it won't be animated while you're editing the slide.
To test the GIF's animation, click the 'Slide Show' icon at the bottom of the window. Alternatively, click the Slide Show tab in the ribbon and then select 'From Current Slide' in the Start Slide group. To cancel the slide show preview, press Esc on your keyboard.
Finding GIFs for Your Presentation
If you don't have a GIF that's just quite right for your presentation, it's pretty easy to find one online. There are thousands of animated GIFs to choose from. A quick search on Google images, including the keyword 'GIF' should do the job.
Alternatively, you can find one within PowerPoint by selecting 'Online Pictures' from Insert tab of the ribbon. This option uses Bing Image search and gives you the choice to search only images that are licensed through Creative Commons, so you won't have to worry about violating copyright laws if you're publishing your presentation online.
Controlling GIF Animation Loops
An animated GIF is basically a mini-movie, composed of at least two images in separate frames. The number of frames determine how much animation is in the GIF, while the number of times the frames will loop determines how long the GIF's image will be animated.
Most GIFs are designed to loop continuously, which could be distracting in a PowerPoint presentation. If you would prefer the animation to stop after some amount of time, you can do that using any online GIF editor. Microsoft recommends using a website like ezgif.com. Other websites gifmaker.org and giphy.com. These websites also give you the ability to make your own GIFs, cut from videos or made by assembling a series of images together.
Upload the GIF to the website and click the 'Split to Frames' button. This reveals each frame used to animate the image. Click the 'Edit Animation' button. Click the 'Loop Count' box and enter the number of times you want the GIF to loop through its frames and then click the 'Make a GIF' button. Click the 'Save' button.
Once the GIF is downloaded to your computer, you can then insert it into a PowerPoint slide.
Editing a GIF in PowerPoint
Just like any other image you insert into a slide, you can move and resize a GIF as needed. To move the image, drag it with your mouse. To resize the GIF without distorting its aspect ration, drag any corner while holding down the Shift key. You can even rotate the image by dragging the circular anchor above the image.
If you click the Format tab in the ribbon while the image is selected, you'll see several other options for adding effects to the image. You can add a border, add shadows inside or outside of the image, or even add a reflection of the image below it using the
Most of the formatting changes won't affect the GIF's animation. However, some effects, like adding a bevel to the image or using one of the 3-D Rotation options will cancel the animation, making the GIF just a still image.
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About the Author
A published author and professional speaker, David Weedmark has advised businesses on technology, media and marketing for more than 20 years. He has taught computer science at Algonquin College, has started three successful businesses, and has written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines and online publications including About.com, Re/Max and American Express.
Photo Credits
- Ingram Publishing/Ingram Publishing/Getty Images
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I am trying to get a simple animation saved using ffmpeg. I followed a tutorial to install ffmpeg, and I can now access it from the command prompt.
Now I run this piece of code:
I get this error:
The last dutch sentence does mean something like: The system can't find the specified file.
What do these errors mean, and how can I solve them?
3 Answers
You need to specify your path to ffmpeg
:
On linux I use:
You will obviously have to point to your windows .exe instead of '/usr/bin/ffmpeg'
If you don't have ffmpeg
installed, you can get it here
for some animation 'anim' i use on windows:
where path should be with and not with / or between folders
Line 183 in animation.py is the subprocess.Popen
call to ffmpeg
. It seems that the ffmpeg
exe is not where matplotlib expects it to be.
My first attempt would be to put the install path (directory) to ffmpeg
into the windows Path
environmental variable. I'm guessing that animation.py is expecting it to be available globally (as it would be under Linux).
If that doesn't work, I'd inspect the subprocess.Popen
call in animation.py to see exactly what it is doing. You could break point it or adjust the verbose.report variable in your matplotlibrc file to spit it out. Line 179 there is: