My boss wanted some animation of the Excel charts. We have an Excel chart which is a plot of the P/L of 10 companies at a point in time. What if you want to see how these ten companies do over a series of time? One way would be to animate the chart as it cycles through the months. I tried to change the values in the tables from which the chart reads off to effect animation, but the resultant animation is oftentimes jerky and unsmooth, unprofessional. Are there better ways to achieve smooth professional-looking animation in Excel? Thanks in advance!

See if it helpshttp://www.google.co.uk/search?q=excel+chart+a ... e=utf-8The first one is a link which shows how to produce a simili animation in powerpointTry this also:Source of problem for smooth animations in XL (reply from a MVP)

Of course if your boss wants animation, you should give it to him. However, aren't there better ways to represent the data? What aspect of the data do you want to highlight? In a time-slice animation, it's easy to compare across companies for a given time, but virtually impossible to track what happens over time. What's wrong with an old-fashioned line plot, one line per company? If that's too many lines, split them into 2 groups. This way, all data is visible at once, not merely as the animation unfolds.

Thanks Bluetrin! That was very useful. ZmeiGorynych, perhaps a bit of background is in order. You are right, there are many ways to do it, and people do not have to hit the Animate button all the time. Background:We would like to monitor 10 banks on a "management dashboard", i.e. the information should be sufficient to detect changes in trends, etc but not so detailed to clutter the dashboard. The idea is that if we detect something through this system, we could always drill down to greater detail when necessary.We have decided on a bubble chart (actually, my boss decided), where the X-Value, Y-Value and size of the bubble each represents a certain Early Warning Indicator. So try to picture a bubble chart, with ten pretty bubbles of all colors and sizes plotted on a 2-D chart.Can we squeeze more information out of this chart? This bubble chart displays the banks' positions relative to each other at a point in time. With animation, we could see how these bubbles (banks) move through time, as well as how they move relative to each other. I have written some code to handle the animation, by re-calculating the position of each bubble and updating Excel, but the animation is not professional enough and the screen flickers quite a bit, which may cause my boss to have epileptic seizure.

We have had pretty good luck pushing data into Excel via DDE from Cascade DataHub. With a little scripting on the DataHub side, not in Excel, we were able to populate the entire Excel range with a single DDE item writing the entire range at once. Excel is much better at producing animated updates when it doesn't have to perform multiple recalculations, so the result is a smoother (though still not perfect) chart refresh. We have done real-time time series plots in Excel at 10Hz and it's livable.Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but the refresh quality in Excel seems to be somewhat dependent on your graphics card and monitor as well.

Write a VBA routine that first hides all the data for the chart, then in a loop, unhides the data one row (period) at a time. Use an Application.Wait Now + TimeValue("00:00:02") statement to adjust the speed of the plotting (here 2 seconds between each period.) The result is pretty smooth.Mike

Hello,Could anyone please post a simple VBA routine that animates a chart in Powerpoint?I am struggling implementing one myself and I need a good starting point.Many thanks.Cheers

Have look at the below link. It's a simple excel animation.http://www.processtrends.com/pg_charts_ ... mation.htm

I'll have a look...I also don't know how to manipulate excel stuff from powerpoint....Mmm, I might give up: too much effort for something whose marketing power is something I really doubt of.Thanks for your help!Cheers