Question

I was wondering if there was any way that I could write in Powerpoint 2010 VBA a small program that animates a gif when a mouse cursor is hovered over it.

Answer 1

Not exactly, but you can write a macro that makes one picture visible when you mouse over another shape.

So add a shape of any sort, it might be a non-animated version of the animated gif, for example. Assign it an Action setting on mouseover of Run Macro: ShowMe

First, add this to your presentation:

Sub ShowMe()
' Edit this to change the slide number as needed and to 
' change "Picture 1" to the actual name of the animated gif
ActivePresentation.Slides(1).Shapes("Picture 1").Visible = True
End Sub

Then use the selection pane to make the animaged gif invisible.

You could put a slightly larger shape behind both of these shapes and set its mouseover action to the macro HideMe, which is the same as ShowMe but set .Visible = False

When the cursor hovers over the ShowMe trigger shape, the anigif becomes visible; when the cursor moves off the gif, it falls on the HideMe shape which triggers the second macro and hides the GIF again.