Some questions about animations in PowerPoint 2010?

1. Not unless you break the table apart. But you can use a third party add-in such as Pro Tools from the publisher PPTAlchemy to do this for you. FYI, I am not affiliated with the publisher of this add-in but know that their products are of excellent quality. This is from their website regarding table animations:

Pro Tools includes a method of animating tables by cell, row or column that has previously required complex and unsatisfactory workarounds. The table is not destroyed and can still be edited.

2. Yes you can use animations within the custom layouts of slide masters.

3. This may be because the layouts are no longer "following" the slide master "parent" (the topmost layout in the slide master view). To confirm, try with a default Microsoft Office template.

What Jamie said.

For #3, first check the layouts as Jamie suggested, but also, your actual slide might not be based on one of the layouts that have animation applied. For example, if you've used a Title Only layout and added a textbox to it, the textbox won't pick up the master animation because that animation is applied to a placeholder (the box where it says "click to add text"). Or maybe you've used a Title and Content layout but you've deleted the content placeholder ("click to add text") and used a manual textbox for your bullet points instead.

Just an idea.

One small clarification of what I said in #1 is that you can animate a table but only as a whole object. For example, you could make a table fade in, move and then fade out (note that PowerPoint attempts to fade by rows from the top but without user control). What you cannot do without breaking it apart, using overlay shapes or a third part add-in is animate it by row, column or cell.

@Jamie Garroch - your answer is exactly what I wanted to know..I know it can be done as an object but not row by row or column by column (the way a chart can be animated) but is useful to know that there are tools that can do it.
@Echo_S and @Jamie Garroch - I tried the Master Slide animation again and yes, works beautifully. That's very handy to know. I assume though that if I had a piece of SmartArt I would have to animate that separately?
I still keep coming across that thing of formatting a master slide with e.g. different font/text colour and not all the slides branching off it picking up on it. It's kind of random when it happens...and I can usually fix it but just wondering why it does happen...thank you both so much :-)

I knew about Shift + click Normal. But I did NOT know this:

If you press Shift and double-click the Normal button, you will switch to Master view with the slide master selected.

You are the Oracle and I bow to your superior knowledge oh great one ;-)

lolol! Julie and I learned about that from a patron, Jean-Gabriel Davy, at our template workshop during Presentation Summit 2016! Best tip evah!

Both contributors were extremely helpful here. Got an answer to a question that has bugged me for a long time and clarification on something  I had wondered about...