At TLC, we love to morph! This transition is one of the most powerful features in PowerPoint and is an amazing tool for setting up the visual part of a story. Morph gives us the ability to seamlessly animate shapes and objects from one form to another. Morph can be used on photos, text and shapes, and objects, however, this blog post focuses on shapes. Specifically, an internal question we have asked ourselves: which is better for PowerPoint Morph, SVG or PowerPoint Shapes?
PowerPoint has the ability for presentation designers to use both built-in PowerPoint shapes and imported .SVG objects (Scalable Vector Graphics) to create these animations.
Let’s take a look.
Note: these slide examples are from an ultrawide project, so the slides are not the default 16×9 aspect ratio. They are 3840 x 1080px (vs. the common 1920 x 1080px). As example:
Let’s first look at the quality of PowerPoint shapes, that shape shift from a star to a heart, using a Morph transition:
Notice how the star does a true shape shift to a heart – this looks good!
But, here is an example of the same Morph using imported .SVG vector art (shape color fills changed for easy comparison).
Did you see it? The SVG objects can’t quite do a true shape shifting morph. The shapes change, but it is more of a fade – this is good, but not great.
So our internal design team asked the question: what happens if the .SVG art is ungrouped to become a PowerPoint shape? We took the .SVG art from the previous example and converted it to a PowerPoint shape by: selecting the star > right click > choose Convert to Shape.
PowerPoint now sees the star as a PowerPoint object, not imported art. For this demonstration the color of the converted star was changed to blue to clearly differentiate.
Here is the same animation with the imported .SVG graphic converted to a PowerPoint shape.
And we’re back! Once converted to a shape, PowerPoint now recognizes it differently and goes back to a true shape shift.
Although SVG and PowerPoint shapes are both vector objects, when using morph, there are very slight differences. While the basic movements and sizing of PowerPoint and SVG vector shapes are the same during a morph, SVG objects might not perform as desired when changing from shape to shape.
-The TLC Creative Design Team