Animations don't play when I go back to a slide

Problem

You display a slide and the animations on it play as you'd expect them to. You move along to the next slide, then go back to the original slide and this time, the animations won't play.

Solution

These articles explain several workarounds:

• Animation Doesn't Play When Viewing Previous Slide
• PPT2000: Sample Code to Reset the Builds on a Slide

Here's the deal: when you return to a slide that's already played, PowerPoint remembers that you've been there, done that, so it shows you the slide as it was in its final state before you moved along to the next one. It's a nice feature really. You wouldn't want to sit through a whole long build series that you've already endure... er.... enjoyed, right?

But sometimes you need to force the slide to start over again from the beginning. When you do:

• Insert a new slide just before the animated slide
• Give it the Blank slide layout
• Set the new slide's Advance settings to Automatically, after 0:00 seconds and give it no transition.
• Set any links to point to this slide rather than the one after it

Now when you link to the animated slide, the link will go to the previous slide, automatically and instantly advance to the animated slide itself, but now it'll start the animations from the beginning.

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