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For some reasons, animated GIFs have stopped working for me in PowerPoint 2003 (on Win XP SP3). This is a problem only with new files - I do have some old presentations where animated GIFs are shown just fine, but when I try to insert a new GIF into a presentation, only the first frame is displayed (both in editing mode and presentation mode).

I first tried inserting the GIF as an image, to no avail. The MS help pages say that I should use the menu "Insert" - "Movies and Sounds" - "Movies and Sounds from file...", but that doesn't even give me .gif as a file extension for a movie. And if I insert it anyway, it doesn't work either.

Any idea what else I could try?

The GIFs work fine in the Windows Explorer or in a browser.

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Could this be the issue? Maybe you are saving in an older format that is Powerpoint '97 compatible, or are using an older viewer?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/247554

There's also info here about certain required flags in the GIF: http://books.google.com/books?id=S8b6TtYGHi8C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=powerpoint+animated+gif+don%27t+work&source=bl&ots=qW8f0nCbIY&sig=sP27bFns-XamPg4JStBLIbwfT-M&hl=en&ei=ihUcS9vIO5CYtgeh99SkCg&sa=X&oi=book%5Fresult&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

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Excellent - your second suggestion led the way! Obviously, the LOOP header was set to 0, causing PPT not to loop at all. Since I didn't want to spend 25$ on GIF Construction Set, I gave ImageMagick a whirl - convert -loop 10 source.gif dest.gif did the trick. Many thanks! – Tim Pietzcker Dec 6 '09 at 21:10
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