Sunday, February 1, 2009

Instant PowerPoint Presentations Using The PhotoAlbum Feature

By Andrew Whiteman

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.

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.

Creating a presentation in this way makes use of a PowerPoint feature called Photo Album. To access this feature, click on New in the File menu. Next, in the New Presentation task pane which appears on the right of your screen, click on 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.

The imported images are ordered alphabetically, so you will almost certainly want to reorder them to coincide with the narrative of your presentation. This is achieved by selecting one or more images and clicking on the arrow icons to move them up or down in the order. You can also highlight one or more images and click Remove to delete them from the presentation.

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.

There is also an option to change what is referred to as the Frame Shape. The default is rectangle. However, the Frame Shape drop-down menu will also let you choose rounded rectangle, bevelled, oval, corner tabs, square tabs or plaque tabs.

That it; you've finished. When you click OK, PowerPoint will create the presentation generating a separate slide for each image, using the settings that you specified in the Photo Album dialogue. The final touch is to go to each slide and type some text into the title box. Once you've done that, you have yourself a PowerPoint presentation. How painless is that!

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