Fake Animate Tables
In PowerPoint, animating table components is not possible unless you ungroup the table. Once your table is ungrouped, you can animate the ungrouped table components as you wish. However, for those of you who don't want to ungroup your table, there is another workaround where you don't actually apply any animation to the table components, but when you play the slide containing the table, it looks like your table components are animating!

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Motion Path Animations
When most people use Motion Path animations, the feature they probably use the least is locking and unlocking the Motion Paths. Why is that so? Probably because these options are not too well documented or even intuitive. However, it's good to know more about these options since locking and unlocking Motion Paths can help you create better animations.

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Edit Points in Motion Paths
While working with Motion Paths, especially after drawing a Custom Motion Path to animate your slide object, you may feel that the path drawn is not very smooth. Or you may have used one of the preset Motion Paths to animate your slide object, and now you want to make some changes. Maybe you want to extend the path, or use smoother corners rather than the default pointed ones. Since Motion Paths are essentially lines drawn in PowerPoint, you can always edit them using the Edit Points option, and reorient them as required.

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Switch Series and Categories
Any typical Column chart contains two sets of data -- one set shows as the Series within your charts, and the other set ends up representing the Categories. By default, the Series show up as the Legend (and columns) within the chart. Categories on the other hand constitute the groups of these individual columns. You can quickly swap the visual representation of Series and Categories in the chart.

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Position Previews for Motion Path Animations
Motion Path animations determine the route (path) and the direction in which the animated slide object moves across or around on the slide. When you add a motion path animation to an object, you see the path as a dotted line with two arrow heads. Additionally, PowerPoint 2013 sports the new faded preview of the animated slide object at the end point of the motion path. The benefit of this faded preview of the end position is that you know exactly where the slide object will stop once the animation concludes.

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Animation Events
Once you add an animation to any slide object, you can play the animation in Slide Show view by clicking your mouse cursor or pressing the spacebar on your keyboard. Another option is to use a button on a presentation remote -- each of these options advances one animation at a time, or may even take you to the subsequent slide. While this approach works for slides that have an animation or two, you will quickly realize that this is certainly not the way to go if your slides have tens of animations, or more. If you add that many animations to any slide, you probably want your animations to be automatically sequenced and play one after the other without a click -- that's exactly where PowerPoint's animation events can help.

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Animation Speed
After you add an animation to a selected slide object, you typically set an animation event. Another animation property you can set thereafter is the speed of the animation. Every animation you add within PowerPoint 2013 has a fixed, default speed. This speed essentially is a duration shown in seconds or part thereof, and differs from animation to animation. For example, the default duration of a Fade animation is half a second (00.50) whereas for the Wheel animation, it is two seconds (02.00).

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Removing an Animation
Removing an animation in PowerPoint is a simple select-and-click option, but even before you remove any animation, do ascertain why you want to remove it. Here are some obvious scenarios to explore before removing animations.