Recently I was troubleshooting a Powerpoint 2007 on Windows Vista issue for a client.
The issue was getting animated GIF files to run embedded in a Powerpoint presentation. The files were created from Photoshop CS4 and were relatively small in size (514k).
They would run fine in a browser and on the Mac version of Powerpoint, but when placed in Powerpoint 2007 Windows, they would come in as images only and would not animate.
After many frustrated attempts at researching the web including Microsoft Office’s online “Help” I noticed that no one had an answer to this problem – including Microsoft! To be fair their answer was a workaround placing the GIF into Windows Media Player and link WMP in the slideshow which 1. did not play and 2. does not embed the GIF file in the slideshow, which made this a very flawed solution. Other forums ran into the same issue, if your GIF did not animate in Powerpoint 2007, you are out of luck. Some blamed it on Vista, others blamed it on missing codecs, but none gave an answer. Sorry, this was unacceptable.
So I lit up the bat-signal and called in the rest of the C2 team including Angelo Vasta and Jim Conway. After tearing apart the original file, they ran the process again and tested several variations of the GIF file out of Photoshop (colors, repeat rates, frames, etc.) and then Jim Conway found the golden ticket. Transparency.
When saving out of Photoshop using Save for Web, the Transparency option was active (which is the default). This animation was not recognized in Powerpoint. With Transparency deactivated, it worked.
So that’s it – if you are creating a GIF for Powerpoint 2007 (Windows) out of Photoshop you must not have Transparency turned on!
