copy animation setup from one slide to an entire presentation

Question

I've inherited from a colleague a huge slide deck, but he doesn't use animation on any slides.

I'd like to do a one-click conversion of the slide deck to incorporate a very simple animation scheme.

I understand how to use the animation painter to copy the animation effects from one slide to a single other slide. But in spite of what Microsoft blithely says in this url, it's not a trivial matter to copy the same scheme 100 times to each slide individually. It's very hard to believe that Powerpoint is so primitive that it doesn't provide a one-click option, but there's nothing about it on the web.

One possible approach would be:

1. set up a template in which my preferred animation scheme is applied to every bullet point list by default
2. open a new presentation
3. import the old unanimated presentation into the new one
4. then hopefully the imported presentation would have the templated animation characteristics.

I've no idea if

1. I can set up a template as proposed
2. my inheritance idea would work

Could anybody advise please?

Answer 1

Any animations you apply to the slide master (or individually to the children layouts) will carry across to all of the individual attached slides -- provided the user has created the slides properly (i.e., used the content placeholders, promoted/demoted bullets the right way, didn't randomly delete placeholders and drop floating text boxes in).

So your approach is the correct one: create a template in which a simple Fade by Word animation (or whatever) is applied to each content placeholder, then copy-and-paste your existing slides into the new template.

But the issue you're likely to have is that the source slides are a mess and for various reasons, the slides won't correctly inherit the animations.