Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Adding a Little Animation to Your Life.

Adding a Little Animation to Your Life

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 24, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


Anyone who says that Excel is boring obviously doesn't know that you can add animation to your workbooks. That's right—you can spice up your life by turning on animation for the feedback you receive from Excel. For instance, instead of seeing a new column immediately appear when you add it, with animation turned on the column will appear to "slide" into position, slyly moving existing columns to the right.

If you want to turn on feedback animation in your system, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Options from the Tools menu. You will see the Options dialog box.
  2. Click on the Edit tab. (See Figure 1.)
  3. Figure 1. The Edit tab of the Options dialog box.

  4. Make sure the Provide Feedback with Animation check box is selected.
  5. Click on OK.

If you are one of those who prefers to not waste perfectly good CPU cycles on something as frivolous as animation, then you can also use the above steps to turn off any animation. (Perhaps some other user of your system turned it on.) Just repeat the above four steps, but clear the check box in step 3.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2737) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Adding a Little Animation to Your Life.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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