How to Guide.. Create basic animated GIF's.

Simple Guide.. How to create your own animated GIF images for your posts/blogs.

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This is guide for those people like myself included that has not been blessed with mad Photoshop skills or access to fancy animation software packages.

This guide is more focused to the "Regular Joe" that wants to spice up their posts a bit by added some animated GIF's.

Intro Image Source: Pixabay

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In this guide I just created a basic test animated GIF below.

The following tools were used during this example.

PowerPoint
Microsoft added a feature to export your PowerPoint presentations to MP4 videos. This feature was added from Office 2010 upwards. PowerPoint has some basic animations and transitions which can be customized as needed.

Movie to Gif (Freeware Software)
I found the following freeware software which is able to convert most of the popular video formats and turn them into an animated GIF file.
The software is called "Movie to GIF" from a company called "ZXT2007" and can be downloaded from on their Website

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Part 1: Create animated MP4 video with PowerPoint

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Step 1.
Create a new PowerPoint slide and select the size you require. To this by going to the "Design" tab and selecting "Slide size", this will help with the proportions for your image.

For this example I just inserted some text using the WordArt tool. You can be very creative and select any nice looking font or images for your project.

Step 2.
Once done go to the animations tab and start adding animations for each items that you would like to add animation too.

Multiple animations can be added to any of the items in your project, be creative and preview as you go along.
Just select the item you would love to add extra animations too and click "Add animation"

Next you can use the animation pane, by enabling it next to the "Add animation" button on the toolbar. The animation pane allows you to rearrange the order in which the animations are played.

Step 3.
Once you are done it's best to save your project, because you never know how software reacts.
Go to File and Create Video or Export & "Create a Video" on older versions of PowerPoint.
Select the quality settings and click "Create Video" and export it to MP4 video file.

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Part 2: Convert video file to an animated GIF

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Open the "Movie to Gif" software, which is you should have downloaded and installed beforehand.

• Click "Open" and select video file, this can be any video your want to convert into GIF.
  For this example I am using the MP4 that was exported from PowerPoint.

• Once done, set start and end position point using the video slider and click the "Set Start" and "Set End" buttons.

• Select GIF properties you want the resulting GIF to be save into. (Resolution, Color properties, Speed and FPS)

• Last step is to click "Save to GIF" and save your Animated GIF where you need to.

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Once done enjoy your animated GIF and use it where you want to. Hope this has been helpful to someone that might need it.

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