How to resize objects as a group in PowerPoint without loosing animations

Question

In PowerPoint (any version I've tried since I first had a computer... including the most recent one), if you want to resize multiple objects simultaneously "as a group", so that also their relative position are proportionally scaled (so the overall appearance is the same), you indeed have to group them first. Unfortunately, this causes all the animations associated with such objects to be lost, since from the point of view of the animations, a group is a single object and its component can't have different animations associated to them.

By searching online, the best workaround I have found goes like this:

• copy your objects
• group them (all animations on the copies are gone now)
• scale the group
• ungroup
• use the "animation painter" to copy the animations and corresponding settings from each of the original objects to the corresponding copy.
• delete the originals

While this do work, it's clearly quite tedious if you have a lot of objects. Is there a better ways to resize multiple objects at once "as a group", but without actually grouping them, so that animations are not lost?

Answer 1

I found an alternative solution, not obviously faster if you only have a a handful of objects, but definitely advantageous in case of many objects. It is also very simple (faster to do than to explain step by step):

• compute the % amount of scaling you want, using your preferred technique (including just estimating by eye)
  • one option is to duplicate the objects, group them, scale them "by hand" to your liking, and then look in properties->size by how much you actually scaled them. Finally delete the copy.
• create a new presentation with a single, empty slide.
  • [optional] from "Design->slide size->custom" set the dimension to a round number, like 10cm x 10cm)
  • [optional] set the slide layout to "blank"
• cut/paste the objects you want to scale from the original presentation to the new one. Animation should be retained.
• now from "Design->slide size->custom", change the size of the slide, scaling it by the amount you want the objects to be scaled.
• PowerPoint will propose you two different scaling behaviors for the content, but if you changed both slide dimensions proportionally, it shouldn't make a difference
• now cut/paste all the objects back into the original slide. They should be scaled, as a group, but retain all their animations

I haven't tested this thoroughly, and I don't know if issues may arise with animation paths or other more complex cases, but for basic animations this can save you a ton of time, especially if you have many objects.