Thank you for sending me the presentation files and the original GIF file. What
I have determined is the following. You may have to read it several times
because it is confusing.
Once you inserted the GIF in the slide you re-sized it, stretching it to fit the
left and right margins. In doing that you changed the aspect ratio
(relationship of width to height). For some reason PowerPoint 2002 can only
display frames 1-5. Frames 6-49 are not displayed, but if you wait long enough
slides 1-5 will display again (as if 6-40 were displayed) and the loop continues
that way. Your animation is set to play only once, but apparently the
stretching has also confused PowerPoint 2002 about that.
I can't explain why PowerPoint 2003 is able to play the GIF (almost) correctly,
but obviously it is a newer version of PowerPoint and perhaps this was a bug fix
that was made. However, a new bug was added to PowerPoint 2003. See
http://www.soniacoleman.com/FAQs/FAQ00191.htm which explains that if you set the
loop flag to one, and don't stretch the animation, it won't play at all in
PowerPoint 2003. If you stretch it, the animation plays in a continuous loop.
So the stretching has also caused PowerPoint 2003 to play it incorrectly. With
the bug the animation *shouldn't* play at all.
You can confirm the behavior in PowerPoint 2002 by doing a simple test. Open
PowerPoint, open the presentation, delete the GIF, re-insert the GIF but don't
resize it, and when you go to View > Slide Show the GIF plays fine and plays
only once. Do the same in PowerPoint 2003 and the animation won't play at all.
Work arounds:
1. Resize the GIF in PowerPoint, preserving the aspect ratio. To do this
select the GIF, hold down the shift key and then drag the upper left corner
"handle" to the left until the image is stretched to the left margin. Then hold
down the shift key and drag the upper right corner "handle" to the right until
the image is stretched to the right margin. This will allow PowerPoint 2002 to
play the animation, and it will play only once. This fix won't work for
PowerPoint 2003.
2. Recreate the Gif at the right size. This would require recreating each of
the 49 frame images (lots of work). However, you would still need two versions
of the GIF if you only want it to play once in both PowerPoint 2002 and 2003.
One version (for PowerPoint 2002) would need to have the looping factor set to
1. The other version (for PowerPoint 2003) would need the looping factor set to
2.
3. Use your animation software to resize the animation to better fit the slide
(960 X 563 pixels). I have used Jasc Animation Shop to re-size the GIF and
created two versions and will email them to you. They should be close to the
slide size. The files are named dig2002.gif (looping factor=1) and dig2003.gif
(looping factor=2).
--
Sonia Coleman
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP Team
Autorun Software, Templates and Tutorials
calm competence nearly said:
Thanks for the reply
yes they are both on the same system.I used Ulead Gif animator to create the
animation.There's no option on ths to play the loop only once-as far as I can
see so IIserted the animation ,timed it and then used custom animation Appear to
put a still image over the animated gif so it looked like part of the sequence.
