PowerPoint Morph slide transition to create simple chemical animations
The Morph slide transition in PowerPoint is quite powerful: when moving between slides that have been set to this transition effect, PowerPoint automatically recognizes and maps the objects from the start and end slides. It then smoothly "morphes" any change (size, position, color, etc.) done to these objects. For example, if on the second slide an object's position is changed, PowerPoint will very smoothly animate the movement of this object on going from the first slide to the next.
Using this slide transition effect has become quite popular to do simple animations without the use of complex animation software. It can, in fact, allow PowerPoint users who have little to no experience with animation software to potentially create simple animations rather easily.
Here, the interest is in the use of the Morph slide transition to animate molecules to illustrate certain chemical principles.
Below is a 1-minute video that briefly highlights the kind of stuff that can be done this way. The possibilities are numerous! Included in the video are simple animations of:
- the stereoinversion during an SN2 reaction
- the stereoelectronic requirement in an E2 reaction
- the stereochemical outcome of the Diels-Alder reaction
- a thin-layer chromatography analysis
Each short animation in the video above involves 2 or 3 PowerPoint slides. Most of the animations are managed by the Morph slide transition, in addition to some individual animations for certain objects. For example, the E2 animation was created in the following way:
1) Create the first slide with all the elements in place.
2) Duplicate this first slide.
3) On the copy slide, re-size/re-orient/re-color/move the objects to the desired state at the end of the animation.
4) While on this second slide, select "Morph" as the slide transition.
5) That's it!
The PowerPoint file used to make this video is this one: Morph_Chemistry_Examples.pptx
In the first three animations, the orbitals, wedges and dashed bonds were pasted in as images from ChemDraw.
There are many videos on YouTube that demonstrate the features and usefulness of the Morph slide transition. For more on the Morph slide transition from Microsoft:
- https://support.office.com/en-us/article/use-the-morph-transition-in-powerpoint-8dd1c7b2-b935-44f5-a74c-741d8d9244ea
- https://support.office.com/en-us/article/morph-transition-tips-and-tricks-bc7f48ff-f152-4ee8-9081-d3121788024f
Note 1: The Morph slide transition is only "officially" available in PowerPoint 365 and 2019. This means that it can be found on the "Transitions" tab of the PowerPoint ribbon. However, the Morph transitions also works in PowerPoint 2016 even though the Morph transition is not on the "Transitions" tab. So the pptx file above should also work with PowerPoint 2016.
Note 2: As Note 1 suggests, you can fully use the Morph transition with PowerPoint 2016. All you need is a 365/2019 PowerPoint file in which the Morph transition was used, and then you can copy and modify slides to use the Morph transition at will in PowerPoint 2016.
Questions? Comments? Corrections? Suggestions?