If you’ve been designing presentations for a while, you’re already familiar with Morph transitions. It’s the PowerPoint transition that creates animations to smoothly move objects from one slide to another. It can be a shape or color change, words and text that magically rearrange, or photos and tiles that fly in across the screen, doing whatever you tell them to. Whether it’s changing location, becoming other objects or shapes, rotating, or spinning, Morph transitions can make it happen!
Since 2016, PowerPoint has been offering this amazing feature that simplifies the old tweening process between objects.
What is Tweening?
For years, tweening – short for “in-betweening” – was the way to animate graphics in video, games, and presentations. The term actually goes back to the early days of hand-drawn animation.
It’s the process of creating images that go between keyframes – a keyframe being the start or end rendering of an animation. In hand-drawn animation, the main artist would draw the keyframes, and the start and end looks. Then the “inbetweener” artist would draw several frame-by-frame animations to create a smooth movement connecting the start and end looks (aka Keyframes).
Today, the legacy term “tweening” is still in use. Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate) adopted the term and process pre-2000. It is also used in Adobe After Effects. With Flash, the artist set the start and end keyframes, and the software accomplished the “in-between” animation frames.
Furthermore, Flash had three different types of tweens, depending on what type of motion animation you needed.
- The Classic Tween: Just a basic move, scale, or rotate.
- The Motino Tween: Added additional motion and effects within the move, scale, or rotate.
- The Shape Tween: Changed one shape to another. The definition of this is literally Morph!
What is Morphing?
So how does PowerPoint Morph compare to tweening? Well, basically Morphing is a form of advanced tweening: a simple-to-use transition effect that animates smooth movement and transformations of objects, photos, and text between slides.
For those with old-school Flash experience, the one thing PowerPoint’s Morph is missing is the ability to see the “in-between” frames and modify them (with additional keyframes). It’s the cost of simplification, where more of the software is empowered to make the decisions.
Essentially, with PowerPoint, the motion is smooth because Morph understands structure, whereas tweening uses numeric values. Think of it this way: Tweening says, “Move from A to B.” Morphing says, “Become B.”
Why is Morphing the New Tweening?
Well, first, Morph just feels more natural. It’s simple to use. And it fits into presentations seamlessly. When things Morph from one shape to another, you’re not jumping from slide to slide or screen to screen; you’re watching things actually change.
This enhances presentations because it’s easier on the brain. Sudden changes on screen can be kind of jarring and distracting. Morphing helps ease you into what’s coming next by showing the transition, not just the end result.
The best part is that moving content with Morph just looks really cool. For PowerPoint, Morph adds a modern, professional vibe without making things overly flashy. It gives presentations a “wow” factor with minimal effort.
Here is an example of PowerPoint Morph (aka tweening) by the TLC Creative presentation design team. Only 4 slides, each is a keyframe. Slide 1 is the start keyframe. Slide 2 is the end keyframe for the slide 1-to-2 animation, AND the start keyframe for the slide 2-to-3 animation. Slide 3 is both an end keyframe and start keyframe, and slide 4 is the end keyframe for the slide 3-to-4 animation (This is probably the most complex aspect of Morph, and all you really need to do is set up the 1st slide, adjust on the 2nd slide, set to Morph transition, done). 
