First of all, is it pronounced GIF, or GIF? Did you just say it in your head both ways? There is endless debate about the pronunciation, and for this I am grateful this article is in print rather than spoken. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. You have likely experienced these short looping animations in a variety of ways, most notably in social media circles. Thanks to Office 365, you now have a new way of creating GIFs… through PowerPoint! Let’s take a look.

Action in the Presentation

Ideally, you will want these to be short and simple presentations. Because GIFs are all about action, consider applying a few actions (Transitions and Animations) to the presentation.

To learn more about Transitions and Animations, I would love to see you at a PowerPoint Essentials session!

You can set up timings for Animations in the Timing group of the Animations tab. Any durations and delays you apply will be honored when you turn the presentation into a GIF.

Timings

For transitions, any “mouse click” items will automatically be turned into a timed action, but you can choose to set timings for slides that you would like to allow a little extra time on for your end users. You can alter the “After” setting in the Transitions tab to accomplish this.

Exporting, and Settings

Once you have your PowerPoint ready to go, visit File, Export and select Create an Animated GIF.

Notice you will have the ability to change the file size and adjust the seconds spent on a slide, which will be overridden by any timings you set in the previous steps.

When you select Create GIF, you will be prompted to select a location, and you will be done!

Thoughts?

What do you think? Will you create GIFs from your PowerPoint Presentations?

Congratulations, Power Users!

Congratulations to our newest Power Users! For the full gallery, and more information about the WSU Microsoft Office Power User Program, please visit: wichita.edu/poweruser