How to Pause Animated GIF in PowerPoint?
GIFs in PowerPoint add a lot to the interactive features of the slides. If you are a regular reader of Twistly Blog, you probably know how to insert GIFs in PowerPoint presentations. These GIFs take less space, load faster, and require no action from the user. But did you ever think of how to pause animated GIF in PowerPoint?
You may not find any direct feature in older versions of PowerPoint that allows you to pause animation but we have some tricks that can work for you.
Note: Latest version of PowerPoint has the Play and Pause buttons when you upload a gif to the slide. For the older versions, use this guide to pause the animations.
Pause Animated GIF in PowerPoint
Why cannot I find an option to pause an animated gif in my presentation? Don’t worry, there is no feature to pause an animation. Adding a duplicate slide might help you, and if it does not work, we can try converting GIF to a video.
What else can you do to pause a GIF in the slide? Let’s see the options that work best for all users. How about starting with the best method to pause a PowerPoint animation?
Method 1: Add a Duplicate Slide
For this method to work, you need to know exactly at what frame you want to pause the GIF. This is not an optimized method but will work for most cases.
Imagine you have a GIF, and you want the audience to closely observe the frame where the eyes of the character are focused. You will follow the steps given to give an impression of a paused GIF in your presentation. In reality, GIF is not paused; we have just tricked the system into thinking it is.
Open the presentation and then go to the slide where you want to insert the GIF.
- Now, go to the Insert tab >> Picture >> From this Device >> Browse GIF and insert it.
- Your slide has the GIF, but it keeps playing without any pause button. Duplicate the slide and play the slideshow.
- Pause the slideshow at the exact frame where you want to capture the GIF and take a screenshot of the slide.
- Now, upload the screenshot to the duplicate slide. On the original slide, we have the GIF and still image on the duplicate slide.
- Use the slide transition to give the effect of pausing the animated GIF
If you have followed the steps, this is how pausing an animated gif will look like in the slideshow. You can try the next method for ease.
Easy Method- Pause the Slideshow
The above method gives accurate results for pausing the animated GIF but also requires you to follow different steps. On the other hand, pausing the slideshow will also pause the animation, but you may not get the exact desired level of flexibility.
Insert the Gif to the slide and start the slideshow, once the slideshow reaches the exact frame of the Gif that you want to pause, freeze the screen by pressing ‘S’ key. Once you have explained the paused Gif, resume the presentation.
Method 3: Convert GIF to Video
Videos can be paused anytime in PowerPoint. For any project that is flexible with type of media, it is better to use video instead of Gif. Do you have the video content for the presentation? You can add video to PowerPoint presentation. If not, then use online video convertors to turn Gif to MP4 video.
Using these online video convertors is easy as you just have to find the right tool, upload your Gif and then convert to the desired format. Once Gif is converted to video, simply insert video to the slides like any other media.
How to Convert a YouTube Video to a Presentation?
While we are on the topic of adding and pausing animated gifs in PowerPoint, have you ever wondered how to convert a YouTube video to a professional presentation?
PowerPoint does not have any such feature to convert YouTube videos to a professional presentation. But with Twistly Add-in for PowerPoint, you can turn any video from YouTube to amazing slides.
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Conclusion- Pause the Animated GIF in PowerPoint
Add a duplicate slide or freeze the slideshow screen to pause animated Gif in PowerPoint. Latest version of PowerPoint has built-in controls to play and pause the animations. Using AI for effective communication is new normal.
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