You may find it useful to animate the elements of a chart or table. For example, you may want to discuss sales of one product throughout all the quarters of the year before going on to the next product. Or you may want to explain a table row by row.

You can add animation to charts. Bar charts look good with a wipe up or wipe right effect. Choose Slide Show | Custom Animation and click the Chart Effects tab. However, this animation works on the chart as a whole, not the individual bars.

Because charts and tables are not broken up into individual objects, you cannot animate the individual elements in their original form. Instead, you need to ungroup them.

To ungroup a chart or table, right-click it and choose Grouping>Ungroup (for a chart) or Ungroup (for a table). At the message asking if you want to convert the chart or table, click Yes. (The message is slightly different, depending on which you choose.) Click the chart or table. If you don't see lots of objects, again ungroup it. You may want to regroup the elements that you're animating together.

Here you see a chart after displaying the first series of data (shoe sales). The table shows the result after displaying the first three rows.