Chart you mean?
You do not need to ungroup them.

After pasting the chart onto PowerPoint,
Go to Custom Animation and add the effect you want.
Double click on the effect to bring up the effect options dialog box.
Click on the Chart Animation tab.
Click on the "Group chart:" dropdown, select By element in category or series.
Uncheck Animate grid and legend (if you do not want to animate it).
OK your way out.

Not all effects will work.
Tested out Blind, appear, fade, wipe, radom effects and wheel so far.

What tohlz said, keeping in mind that sometimes animating a Graph affects the
quality of the text in the graph. Breaking up the graph will help you avoid
this...

If you can select and group items, that may help you when you go to animate
them. Of course, you want to group items that will be animated together.

Zooming in on the slide often helps me to select items. You can also draw a
marquee around objects you want to select. You can also make sure nothing is
selected and then hit the Tab button to select items on the slide one after
the other.

There's also Select Multiple Objects. See
http://www.techsmith.com/community/blogcomments.asp?thread=38 for an
explanation.

Also, making the fills in the chart "flat" before ungrouping them is a best
practice to follow. If you need gradient fills, apply those to the shapes
after you've ungrouped the chart. Otherwise, you may end up with a
nightmare's worth of objects when the gradient fills are ungrouped.

Be sure to delete the extra empty rectangle that is created when you ungroup
a chart. (You ungroup the chart twice, then delete the big rectangle. You
may want to use the Tab technique to select that rectangle easily.) This
rectangle can sometimes make selecting objects problematic -- especially if
you like to marquee around objects to select them, it gets in the way.