PowerPoint presentations are a great way of communicating and influencing your clients, work colleagues or audience. One of the most important components within presentations are images. This article will show you how to take a group of images and turn them, as if by magic, into a PowerPoint presentation.
This technique works best where the images are closely related to the core theme of the presentation, for example, if you are introducing a new product range and you have just loaded a bunch of product images onto your computer.
You begin by choosing New from the File menu which displays the New Presentation task pane on the right of your screen. In the New Presentation task pane window, you click on the option marked “Photo Album…”.
When the Photo Album window appears, you begin identifying the images you want included in the presentation. You can click on the button marked File/Disk to browse for the images or you can import them straight from your digital camera or scanner.
Your images are imported and listed in alphabetical order. This is almost certainly not the order in which you want them to appear in your presentation. So the next step is to rearrange them by clicking on the arrow icons to move selected images up or down in the list. You can also remove images from the list by clicking the name of the image and clicking the Remove button.
Is the orientation of any of our images not quite right for this presentation? No problem. Just highlight the image then click on the rotate icon to change it. Not happy with the tonal qualities of an image? No problem. Click on the appropriate button to increase or decrease the contrast or brightness levels.
However important a part your images will play in the presentation, every presentation will need some text. The Picture Layout drop-down menu lets you specify whether you want one, two or four images with a title. (You can omit the title, though it is unlikely you will wan to do so.) You can also place the title above or below the image.
If you wish, you can also change the shape of your images. This is done in a drop-down menu called Frame Shape. The default shape is rectangular but also available are rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs.
Finally, click OK to create the presentation. To finish it off, you just need to click in the title box of each slide and add your text. And that’s it, a bona fide PowerPoint presentation automatically created from a bunch of images!
The author is a trainer and developer with Macresource Computer Training, an independent computer training company offering PowerPoint training in London and throughout the UK.
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