Thursday, August 6, 2009

Instant PowerPoint Presentations Using The PhotoAlbum Feature

By Andrew Whiteman

Whether you are communicating with an audience, your colleagues at work or a group of clients or potential clients, a PowerPoint presentation is a great way of getting you message across. But did you know, you can base a PowerPoint presentation around a group of images and, what's even better, PowerPoint will create the presentation for you.

You can use the techniques described in this article whenever you have a group of images whose content are at the core of the presentation you need to create. One example might be giving a presentation to introduce a new range of products based around a series of product photos.

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".

Clicking on the Photo Album option displays a window in which you begin by choosing the images required for your presentation. Just click on the button labelled File/Disk and select the images. Alternatively, click on Camera/Scanner and load the images directly from your scanner or digital camera.

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.

Next, you can check the tonal quality of each image. You can increase or decrease the brightness or contrast as necessary by just clicking on one of the four image control icons. In addition, you can rotate images clockwise or anti-clockwise by clicking on one of the two image transformation icons.

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.

Next, there is the shape of the image. In the drop-down menu labelled Frame Shape, you can choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs and plaque tabs. If you don't want anything fancy, just leave the shape set to the default value of rectangle.

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!

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