powerpoint: how to manage overlapping images for a custom animation

Question

I have made some images perfectly overlapped in a slide. Now I have to build a custom animation that makes one of them at a time appearing and disappearing according to a complicated sequence.

Unfortunately, when I try to select an image only the most foreground one is selected, and I am not able to select all the other ones. How can I select a specific overlapped image to attach an animation to it?

Answer 1

In PowerPoint 2003 and I believe later versions, open the Custom Animation pane (Ctrl-F1 and select Custom Animation from the dropdown list at the top). The Custom Animation pane lists all objects on the slide which can be animated--just select the one you want and assign it an animation.

Answer 2

Well I had the same issue and good news! There's a perfect way to it:

Home -> Select -> Enable the Selection Pane

Now in the selection pane you must see some names (probably some of them sheer gibberish!), those are the objects of your slide(I recommend you specify meaningful names for them specially if you're going to add many animations)

Now Go to the animation pane (while keeping the selection pane still opened). Select the object you want to animate and click "Add Animation".

Animations -> Add Animation

The interesting point is that by selecting multiple objects from the selection pane(hold the Ctrl key on the keyboard and choose them) you can add the same animations to all of them at once! Say I have three envelopes on the slide and I want to disappear them together. I've already named them env1, env2, env3. Now I choose all of them and add the "disappear" animation to them. Hope that helps! (tested on PowerPoint 2016)